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'Iron Lady' Thatcher changed Britain, made enemies on way

'Iron Lady' Thatcher changed Britain, made enemies on way

London - Margaret Thatcher, who died Monday at 87, brought fundamental economic, social and political change to Britain -earning her admiration and contempt in equal measure.

She because Britain's first female prime minister, served a record 11 and a half years in office from 1979 to 1990 and was the first British leader whose politics and name gave rise to an "ism": Thatcherism.

Her views and politics won her the support among those who believed she made Britain great again. But critics saw her as a divisive and polarizing force.
Despite her many enemies, Baroness Thatcher would be remembered as one of the greatest leaders of peacetime Britain, commentators said, as those who followed in her footsteps continued to lay claim to her legacy.
In 1976, three years before she came to power, her hard-hitting attack on "Soviet world dominance" led Moscow's Red Star newspaper to christen her the "Iron Lady" - a nickname in which she took delight and which remained associated with her image of unwavering toughness.
 
"I'm not hard - I am frightfully soft - but I will not be hounded," she once said during her notoriously thorny exchanges withthe European Union.
 
Thatcherism had an impact well beyond British shores.
 
Time magazine wrote in 1998 that Thatcher had played a decisive role in the "triumph of capitalism" as manifested in the near-universal acceptance of the free market and the 1991 collapse of Soviet imperialism after the Cold War.
 
However, she was also one of the first Western politicians to respond warmly to reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she described as "a man we can do business with" after a 1985 meeting.
 
At home, Thatcher set in motion a series of economic reforms that saw mines, shipyards and steelworks closed and brought large-scale privatization of state-owned industries as well as unemployment.
 
In the spring of 1990, months before she resigned after a challenge to her leadership, protests against a new community tax led to the worst riots in London in a decade.
 
A plea for a U-turn from within her own party on some of the more drastic economic measures produced the most famous quote of her career: "The Lady is not for turning."   Thatcher drew her convictions from her austere wartime childhood as the daughter of a small-town grocer from Grantham in the north-eastern county of Lincolnshire, where she was born October 13,1925.
 
"My policies are not based on some economic theory but on things I and millions like me were brought up on: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. Live within your means. Put a nest egg by for a rainy day. Pay your bills on time. Support the police," she said.
 
Her convictions, translated into slogans and policies, fired the aspirations of the hard-working lower classes to strive for middle-class values in what became known as the "Thatcher Revolution."   Her other trademarks included immaculate hair and handbags for a leader who inspired plays, a musical, satirical shows and a Hollywood film.
 
As a young woman, Margaret Hilda Roberts aimed for a political career, even while working after graduating at Oxford as a chemist. Her marriage in 1951 to the successful businessman Denis Thatcher, atop executive at Burmah Oil, was to help her on her way.
 
By 1959, she had won her first parliamentary seat for the Conservatives.  The couple had twins, Mark and Carol, born in 1953.Thatcher once said that without her husband, who died in 2003, she could not have succeeded.
 
During the 1970s, Thatcher became increasingly persuaded that Britain had to be fundamentally reformed and took over the partyleadership in 1975.
 
Her central aim was to push back the state, cutting public expenditures, privatizing nationalized industries, ending subsidies and reducing taxes.
 
Bankruptcies and soaring unemployment were the initial consequences, but she ensured her 1983 electoral victory with the defeat of Argentina in the Falklands War.
 
Her next stand-off was a 51-week miners strike, ended in 1985 only after large-scale police deployments.
 
But the divide between the haves and have-nots was growing, and public services were in decline. Thatcher's response was typical. "If any man will not work, neither let him eat" was a quote from St Paul she was fond of repeating.
 
In October 1984, on the day before her 59th birthday, Thatcher narrowly escaped death when the anti-British Irish Republican Army planted a bomb at a hotel in Brighton in southern England where she was staying for the Conservative Party conference.
 
By November 1990, she had made enough enemies within the Conservative Party that an internal revolt forced her out. After her tearful, reluctant exit from Downing Street on November 28, 1990, she said: "Home is where you go when you have nothing else to do."
 
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