Margaret Thatcher - publié le 21/08/2020

Thèmes abordés

Margaret Thatcher

Résumé du document

Contrary to what one might believe thinking back about her time as a Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher did not come from a particularly wealthy or bourgeois milieu. She was born in 1925 in a Methodist family, who also owned a grocery store business.

Extraits

[...] She can also be considered responsible for the taming of the Labour Party, which quietly consented not to go back on most of her legislations. In a sense, she was a visionary, because she represented the type of ultimate welfare-state-breaking, conservative minded politician that seems to bloom nowadays across Europe, from Emmanuel Macron, who shares more similarities with her than he's willing to admit, to Mariano Rajoy, Theresa May and Sebastian Kurz. But she was successful because she arrived at the right moment, and just had to surf on the conservative zeitgeist : Reagan was at the time setting the ideological tone for the West, and left wind ideas were falling in disgrace. [...]

[...] But her true alter ago lived on the other side of the Atlantic : Ronald Reagan. Their politics view were virtually similar (although fundamentally differentiated by the specificities of their respective countries). In her own country, she is mostly remembered for saving Great Britain from an economical collapse in the 70s, using high interest rates during her first term (which even had to be doubled in 1988) and a very agressive privatisation campaign. But the most controversial part of her second term was probably her clash with the labour unions, which went on for nearly two years (1984-1985) as a consequence of her will to reform trade unions to diminish their power. [...]

[...] Margaret Thatcher biography Contrary to what one might believe thinking back about her time as a Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher did not come from a particularly wealthy or bourgeois milieu. She was born in 1925 in a Methodist family, who also owned a grocery store business. Thatcher was a brilliant student, and studied chemistry at Oxford University from 1943 to 1947, and after a brief run for a parliamentary seat in the early 50s, she went back to university, to study law this time, before going back to the Conservatives at the end of the decade. [...]

[...] There are perhaps two keys to understand the politics and the character of Thatcher : her religious education and her political ascension. Both shaped her, as a child, or as the Tory Party's rising star during the 60s and 70s, and made her the Prime Minister she turned out to be. Her pro-corporate, anti-unions political views can be easily understood when we acknowledge the fact that she was a self made woman all the way. Having to fight her way through a men's dominated world was certainly extremely hard, and the fact that she succeeded probably comforted her in her meritocrat world view. [...]