Pedro Martínez

Pedro Martinez also skipped his last start in 2002, after the Red Sox had been eliminated from the postseason; some have suggested that this hurt him in the Cy Young voting that year, when he finished second to Oakland's Barry Zito. ".. This was not the first time Martínez had pulled out of an All-Star Game. In defeat, Margaret Thatcher seized the opportunity of the debate on confidence in her government to deliver one of her most memorable performances:. Pedro pulled out of the 2005 All Star Game because of short rest, pitching Sunday July 10th. Thatcher announced to her cabinet that she would not be a candidate in the second ballot, thereby bringing her term of office to an end. Martínez's first cousin, Denny Bautista, is a Major League pitcher for the Kansas City Royals. On November 22, at just after 9.30 am, Mrs.

Their younger brother, Jesús, also pitched in the Dodgers farm system for several years. A large majority believed that, the first round not being a clear win, she would lose the second run-off ballot. Martínez's brother Ramón Martínez was also a Major League pitcher and the brothers have twice been teammates, with the Dodgers (1992-93) and Red Sox (1999-2000). Upon returning to London, Thatcher consulted her cabinet colleagues. This was probably at least in part due to mismanagement; she had fatally decided to be out of the country for the CSCE summit (Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe) in Paris, and her advisors appear to have underestimated the seriousness of the matter and the need to campaign, and the need to cajole potentially wavering supporters and reassure them in order to achieve the necessary first round win and put paid to talk of doubts. The results were: Margaret Thatcher: 204, Michael Heseltine: 152, Void/Spoiled: 16.

(The margin was 14.6%; and the necessary margin required to avoid a second ballot was 15%.). In the first ballot, Thatcher was two votes short of winning automatic re-election, a small but critical margin. In his resignation speech Howe condemned Thatcher's policy on the European Community as being devastating to British interests, and openly invited "others to consider their own response", which led Michael Heseltine to announce his challenge for party leadership (and hence Prime Minister). No! No! No!".

Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate. The President of the Commission, Mr. Yes, it is a non-elected body and I do not want the Commission to increase its powers at the expense of the House, so of course we differ. "Yes, the Commission wants to increase its powers.

The immediate pretext was a particularly combative answer she had given to a parliamentary question in the Commons on the October 30, 1990, in which she denounced the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors. A challenge was precipitated by the resignation of Sir Geoffrey Howe, with whom Thatcher had for a long time had very bad personal relations, on November 1, 1990. By 1990, opposition to Thatcher's policies on local government taxation, her Government's perceived mishandling of the economy (especially high interest rates of 15%, which were undermining her core voting base within the home-owning, entrepreneurial and business sectors), and the divisions opening within her party and in the broader political landscape over the appropriate handling of European integration due to Thatcher's Euroscepticism made her and her party seem increasingly politically vulnerable. Few who attended could have realised that Mrs Thatcher had only a matter of weeks left in office.

The conference that year saw a degree of unity break out within the Conservative Party. Major persuaded her that the only way to maintain monetary stability was to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism at the same time, despite not meeting the 'Madrid conditions'. On the Friday before the Conservative Party conference in October 1990, Thatcher persuaded her new Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major to reduce interest rates by 1%. Bush was somewhat apprehensive about the plan, but Thatcher famously told him that this was "no time to go wobbly!".

Bush to deploy troops to the Middle East to drive Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait. W. One of her final acts in office was to pressure US President George H. Mrs Thatcher refused to compromise, or change the tax, and its unpopularity was a major factor in Thatcher's downfall.

Opponents of the tax banded together to resist bailiffs and disrupt court hearings of poll tax debtors. Millions of people resisted paying the tax. A large London demonstration against the poll tax on March 31, 1990 -- the day before it was introduced in England and Wales--turned into a riot. Some have argued that local councils saw the introduction of the new system of taxation as the opportunity to make significant increases in the amount taken, assuming (correctly) that it would be the originators of the new tax system and not its local operators who would be blamed.

Additional problems emerged when many of the tax rates set by local councils proved to be much higher than earlier predictions. Despite her hopes, the early introduction led to a sharp decline in the already low support for the Conservative party in Scotland. Thatcher apparently believed that the new tax would be popular, and had been persuaded by Scottish Conservatives to bring it in early and in one go. However, it led to accusations that Scotland was a 'testing ground' for the tax.

The Charge was introduced early in Scotland as the rateable values would in any case have been reassessed in 1989. This was to be the most universally unpopular policy of her premiership. Rates were replaced by the "Community Charge" (more widely known as the Poll Tax), which applied the same amount to every individual resident, with only limited discounts for low earners. Thatcher's new system to replace local government rates was introduced in Scotland in 1989 and in England and Wales in 1990.

Thatcher easily defeated Meyer's challenge, but there were 60 ballot papers either cast for Meyer or abstaining, a surprisingly large number for a sitting Prime Minister. As Meyer was a virtually unknown backbench MP, he was viewed as a stalking horse candidate for more prominent members of the party. That November, Thatcher was challenged for the leadership of the Conservative Party by Sir Anthony Meyer. Lawson resigned that October, feeling that Thatcher had undermined him.

Thatcher took revenge on both by demoting Howe, and by listening more to her adviser Sir Alan Walters on economic matters. At the Madrid European summit, Lawson and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe forced Thatcher to agree the circumstances under which she would join the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a preparation for monetary union. She blamed her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, who had been following an economic policy which was a preparation for monetary union; Thatcher claimed not to have been told of this and did not approve. Thatcher's popularity once again declined in 1989 as the economy suffered from high interest rates imposed to stop an unsustainable boom.

The speech caused an outcry in most of Europe, and exposed for the first time the deep split that was emerging over European policy inside her Conservative Party. She was specifically against Economic and Monetary Union, through which a single currency would replace national currencies, and for which the EC was making preparations. "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a new super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels". Although she had supported British membership, Thatcher believed that the role of the EC should be limited to ensuring free trade and effective competition, and feared that new EC regulations would reverse the changes she was making in the UK.

At Bruges, Belgium in 1988, Thatcher made a speech in which she outlined her opposition to proposals from the European Communities for a federal structure and increasing centralisation of decision-making. [2]. In 1990, she opened the Hadley Centre for climate prediction and research. In 1988, she made a major speech accepting the problems of global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain.

In the late 1980s, Thatcher, a former chemist, became concerned with environmental issues, which she had previously dismissed. The "Social Fund" system that placed one-off welfare payments for emergency needs under a local budgetary limit and wherepossible changed them into loans, and rules for assessing jobseeking effort by the week, were breaches of social consensus unprecedented since the 1920s. Hard welfare reforms in her third term created an adult Employment Training system that included full-time work done for the dole plus a £10 top-up, on the workfare model from the US. Many opponents believed she and her policies created a significant North-South divide from the Bristol Channel to the Wash, between the "haves" in the economically dynamic south and the "have nots" in the northern rust belt.

Her unpopularity on the left is evident from the lyrics of several contemporary popular songs: "Stand Down Margaret" (The Beat), "Tramp the Dirt Down" (Elvis Costello), and "Mother Knows Best" (Richard Thompson). She was known as "Maggie" in the tabloids, which inspired the well-known "Maggie Out!" protest song, sung throughout that period by some of her opponents. Most United Kingdom newspapers supported her—with the exception of The Daily Mirror and The Guardian—and were rewarded with regular press briefings by her press secretary, Bernard Ingham. By winning the 1987 general election, on the economic boom and against a stubbornly anti-nuclear Labour opposition, she became the longest serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since Lord Liverpool, 1812 to 1827,and first to win 3 successive elections since Lord Palmerston in 1865.

We are simply asking to have our own money back". She was widely (and maliciously) misquoted as saying, "I want my money", although her actual statement was: "We are not asking the Community or anyone else for money. At the Fontainebleau summit of 1984, Thatcher argued that the United Kingdom paid far more to the European Economic Community than it received in spending and negotiated a budget rebate. In 1984, she visited China and signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration with Deng Xiaoping on 19 December, stating the basic policies of the People's Republic of China regarding Hong Kong, to remain a "Special Autonomous Region" of China without economic change after the handover in 1997.

Thatcher had two noted foreign policy successes in her second term. However, it is widely believed to have been politically motivated, as all of the abolished councils were controlled by Labour, and had become powerful centres of opposition to her government and in favour of higher spending by local government. The government claimed this was an efficiency measure. In 1986 her government controversially abolished the Greater London Council (GLC), led by the left-winger "Red" Ken Livingstone, and six Metropolitan County Councils (MCCs).

[1] This award had always previously been given to Prime Ministers that had been educated at Oxford. In 1985, the University of Oxford, as a deliberate snub, voted to refuse her an honorary degree in protest against her cuts in funding for education. Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine, who had pushed the Agusta deal, resigned in protest at her style of leadership, and thereafter became a potential leadership challenger. Her liking for defence ties with the United States was demonstrated in the Westland affair when she acted with colleagues to prevent the helicopter manufacturer Westland, a vital defence contractor, from linking with the Italian firm Agusta in favour of a link with Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation of the United States.

She supported the US bombing raid on Libya from bases in the UK in 1986 when other NATO allies would not. Thatcher outlasted the Cold War, which ended in 1989, and voices who share her views on it credit her with a part in the West's victory, by both the deterrence and détente postures. This was a start in swinging the West back to a new détente with the Soviet Union in his era, as it proved to be an indication that the Soviet regime's power was decaying. However, she later was the first Western leader to respond warmly to the rise of reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, declaring she liked him and "We can do business together" after a meeting 3 months before he came to power in 1985.

Thatcher to station nuclear cruise missiles at British bases, arousing mass protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. US forces were permitted by Mrs. This contrasted with the policy of détente which the West had pursued during the 1970's, and caused friction with allies still wedded to the idea of détente. In the Cold War Mrs Thatcher supported Ronald Reagan's policies of deterrence against the Soviets.

Privatisation has since been exported across the globe; a testament to its success in rejuvenating moribund government controlled industries while substantially improving the government's balance sheet. The policy of privatisation, while anathema to many on the left, has become synonymous with Thatcherism. Many in the public took advantage of share offers, although many sold their shares immediately for a quick profit. After the 1983 election, the Government became bolder and sold off most of the large utilities which had been in public ownership since the late 1940s.

Since gaining power, she had experimented in selling off a small nationalised company, the National Freight Company, to its workers, with a surprisingly large response. Thatcher's political and economic philosophy emphasised free markets and entrepreneurialism. The agreement stood, and Thatcher punished the unionists for their non-cooperation by abolishing a devolved assembly she had created only four years before. This was another effect of the changed balance of power in industrial relations.

Then, unlike the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974, they found they could not bring the agreement down by a general strike. The Ulster Unionists and Democratic Unionists made an electoral pact and on January 23, 1986, staged an ad-hoc referendum by re-fighting their seats in by-elections, and won with 1 seat lost to the nationalist SDLP party. The agreement was greeted with fury by Irish unionists. On November 15, 1985, Thatcher signed the Hillsborough Anglo-Irish Agreement, the first acknowledgement by a British government that the Republic of Ireland had an important role to play in Northern Ireland.

Thatcher insisted that the conference open on time the next day and made her speech as planned. A prominent member of the Cabinet, Norman Tebbit, was injured, along with his wife Margaret, who was left paralysed. Five people died in the attack, including Roberta Wakeham (the first wife of the government's Chief Whip John Wakeham) and the Conservative MP Sir Anthony Berry. On the early morning of October 12, 1984, Thatcher escaped death (on the day before her 59th birthday) from the bomb planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Brighton's Grand Hotel during the Conservative Party conference.

This aborted political strike marked a turning point in UK politics: no longer could militant unions remove a democratically elected government. The Miners' Strike lasted a full year, 1984-5, before the drift of half the miners back to work forced the NUM leadership to give in without a deal. But images of massed militant miners using violence to prevent other miners from working, along with that (illegally under a recent Act) the NUM had not held a ballot to approve strike action, swung public opinion against the strike--especially in the south and the moderate Nottinghamshire coalfield. Police tactics during the strike concerned civil libertarians: stopping believed strike sympathisers travelling towards coalfields when they were still long distances from them, phone tapping as evidenced by Labour's Tony Benn, and a violent battle with mass pickets at Orgreave, Yorkshire.

However, Thatcher had made preparations long in advance for an NUM strike by building up coal stocks, and there were no cuts in electric power, unlike 1972-4. The most significant of these was carried out by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Several unions launched strikes that were wholly or partly aimed at damaging her politically. Thatcher was committed to reducing the power of the trade unions but, unlike the Heath government, adopted a strategy of incremental change rather than a single Act.

This unbalanced splitting of the left of centre vote without a corresponding effect to the right, in combination with Britain's first past the post electoral system, where marginal changes in vote numbers and distribution have disproportionate effects on the number of seats won, also contributed to the Conservative landslide. They were a grouping of uncertain cohesion and it is apparent from the result that they drew votes mainly away from Labour. Consequently upon the Labour split, there was a new centrist/moderate left challenge, the Alliance, from the Social Democrats in electoral pact with the Liberals, to break the major parties' dominance and win proportional representation. Indeed, one Labour MP, Gerald Kaufman, has called the party's 1983 manifesto "the longest suicide note in history".

Labour fought the election on unilateral nuclear disarmament, which proposed to abandon the British nuclear deterrent despite the threat from a nuclear armed Soviet Union, withdrawal from the European Community, and total reversal of Thatcher's economic and trade union changes. This drove a significant number of right wing Labour members and MPs to form a breakaway party in 1981, the Social Democratic Party. Labour was increasingly dominated by its "hard left" wing that had emerged from the 1970s union militancy, and in opposition its policies were swung very sharply to the left. The 1983 election was also influenced by events in the opposition parties.

Additionally, Thatcher's 'Right to Buy' policy, whereby council housing residents were permitted to buy their homes at a discount did much to increase her government's popularity in working-class areas. Continuing mass unemployment was explained as a consequence of this transition, implying it to be transitory, and alongside it new laws had given trade union members democratic powers to restrain militant union leaderships. However, the economy was still in a deep recession associated with encouraging traditional heavy industries to come to an end. This Falklands Factor, as it came to be known, is regarded as crucial to the scale of the Conservative majority in the June 1983 general election.

The ensuing military campaign was successful, resulting in a wave of patriotic enthusiasm for her personally, at a time when her popularity had been at an all-time low for a serving Prime Minister. Within days, Thatcher sent a naval task force to recapture the Islands. Argentina has claimed the islands ever since an 1830s dispute on their settlement. On 2 April 1982, it invaded the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas to Argentines), the only invasion of a British territory since World War II.

In Argentina an unstable military junta was in power and keen on reversing its huge economic unpopularity. British defence budget cuts, applying in the South Atlantic, coupled with Thatcher's disregard of the Falkland Islands and the removal of the ice patrol ship Endeavour and immigration reform detrimental to the British citizenship rights of citizens of the British Empire's few remnants - which was motivated mainly against Hong Kong - provoked the arguably most difficult foreign policy decision of Thatcher's era. By the time of the 1983 election the economy was in a mess. Unemployment continued to rise, reaching an official figure of 3.6 million (the criteria for defining who was unemployed was amended, and others estimate that unemployment hit 5 million), and it remained over 3 million for several years.

In January 1982, the inflation rate dropped to single figures and interest rates were then allowed to fall. That she meant what she said was confirmed in the 1981 budget, when despite concerns expressed in an open letter from 364 economists, taxes were increased in the middle of a recession. The lady's not for turning". Political commentators harkened back to the Heath Government's "U-turn" and speculated that Mrs Thatcher would follow suit, but she repudiated this approach at the 1980 Conservative Party conference, telling the party: "To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catch-phrase - the U-turn - I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to.

There was a severe recession in the early 1980s, and the Government's economic policy was widely blamed. Interestingly, her early tax policy reforms were based on the monetarist theories of Friedman rather than the supply-side economics of Arthur Laffer and Jude Wanniski, which the government of Ronald Reagan espoused. These moves hit businesses, especially in the manufacturing sector, and unemployment quickly passed two million. She had a preference for indirect taxation over taxes on income, and value added tax (VAT) rose sharply to 15% with the result that inflation also rose.

In economic policy, Thatcher started out by increasing interest rates to drive down the money supply. Another noticeable foible of Thatcher's was her refusal to call Cardinal Tomas O'Fiach (pronounced Oh-fee-uk), the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, by his chosen name, insisting on calling him "Cardinal Fee", although, to be fair, his birth name was Thomas Fee and the names are pronounced similarly, but had the Cardinal (dubbed the "Sinn Fein Cardinal" by the British media) condemned republican violence as his successors would do, perhaps she would have made the effort to pronounce his name in the Gaelic fashion. This meant relieving the burden on the mainstream British army and elevating the role of the Ulster Defence Regiment and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Thatcher also continued the policy of "Ulsterisation" of the previous Labour government and its Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Roy Mason, believing that the unionists of Ulster should be at the forefront in combatting Irish republicanism.

This was a major propaganda coup for the IRA and is seen as the beginning of Sinn Féin's electoral rise, as they capitalised on the gains made during the hunger strikes. Thatcher refused at first to countenance a return to political status for republican prisoners, famously declaring "Crime is crime is crime; it is not political." However, after 9 more men had starved themselves to death and the strike had ended, and in the face of growing anger on both sides of the Irish border and widespread civil unrest, political status was restored to all paramilitary prisoners. Bobby Sands, the first of the strikers, was elected as an MP for the constituency of Fermanagh and South Tyrone a few weeks before he died. In 1981 a number of Provisional IRA and INLA prisoners in Northern Ireland's Maze prison (known in Ireland as 'Long Kesh', its previous name) went on hunger strike to regain the status of political prisoners, which had been revoked five years earlier.

In May 1980, one day before she was due to meet the Irish Taoiseach, Charles Haughey to discuss Northern Ireland, she announced in the House of Commons that "The future of the constitutional affairs of Northern Ireland is a matter for the people of Northern Ireland, this government, this parliament and no-one else.". It seemed for a time that conservatism might be the dominant political philosophy in the major English-speaking nations for the era. She was a philosophic soulmate with Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 in the United States, and to a lesser extent Brian Mulroney, who was elected a little later in Canada. Thatcher was incensed by one contemporary view within the Civil Service that its job was to manage the UK's decline from the days of Empire, and wanted the country to punch above its weight in international affairs.

She formed a government on May 4, 1979, with a mandate to reverse the UK's economic decline and to reduce the role of the state in the economy. On election day, the Conservatives won a large parliamentary majority and Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Most opinion polls showed that voters preferred James Callaghan as Prime Minister even as the Conservative Party maintained a lead, but the Labour Government's severe failings with the Trade Unions over the winter of 1978-9, dubbed the 'Winter of Discontent', were ably criticized by the Conservatives, whose catchy campaign posters proclaimed that "Labour Isn't Working". An interview she gave to Granada Television's World in Action programme in 1978, in which she spoke of her concerns about immigrants "swamping" the UK, aroused particular controversy as immigration was a substantial party issue at that time.

She reversed Heath's support for devolution to Scotland. Thatcher had to act cautiously in converting the Conservative Party to her monetarist beliefs. At first she appointed many Heath supporters in the Shadow Cabinet and throughout her administrations sought to have a cabinet that reflected the broad range of opinions in the Conservative Party. The last nickname was due to her father's profession, but coined at a time when she was considered as Edward Heath's ally; he had been nicknamed "The Grocer" by Private Eye.

She acquired many other nicknames such as "The Great She-Elephant", "Attila the Hen" and "The Grocer's Daughter". She took delight in the name and it soon became associated with her image as an unwavering and steadfast character. In response, the Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper Red Star gave her the nickname "The Iron Lady", which was soon publicised by Radio Moscow world service. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.".

The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. "The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The most famous part of her speech ran:. On January 19, 1976 she made a speech in Kensington Town Hall in which she made a scathing attack on the Soviet Union.

She appointed Heath's preferred successor William Whitelaw as her deputy. Unexpectedly she outpolled Heath on the first ballot and won the job on the second, in February 1975. After Heath lost the second election that year, Joseph and other right-wingers declined to challenge his leadership, but Thatcher decided that she would. However, she agreed with Sir Keith Joseph that the Heath Government had lost control of monetary policy.

In this job she promoted a policy of abolishing the rating system that paid for local government services, which proved a popular policy within the Conservative Party. After the Conservative defeat in February 1974, she was promoted again, to Shadow Environment Secretary. Thatcher also defended the budget of the Open University from attempts to cut it. Her term was marked by many proposals for more local education authorities to abolish grammar schools and adopt comprehensive secondary education, of which she approved, even though this was widely seen as a left-wing policy.

Nevertheless, this provoked a storm of public protest, earning her the nickname "Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher", coined by The Sun. In her first months in office, forced to administer a cut in the Education budget, she decided that abolishing free milk in schools would be less harmful than other measures. When the Conservatives won the 1970 general election, Thatcher became Secretary of State for Education and Science. She won promotion to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Fuel Spokesman in 1967, and was then promoted to shadow Transport and finally Education before the 1970 election.

She made her mark as a conference speaker in 1966 with a strong attack on the taxation policy of the Labour Government as being steps "not only towards Socialism, but towards Communism". However she was opposed to the abolition of capital punishment. Thatcher was one of few Conservative MPs to support the Bill to decriminalise male homosexuality, and she voted in favour of David Steel's Bill to legalise abortion. She moved to the Shadow Treasury Team after 1966.

When Sir Alec Douglas-Home stepped down, Thatcher voted for Edward Heath in the leadership election over Reginald Maudling, and was rewarded with the job of Conservative spokesman on Housing and Land. She was given early promotion to the front bench as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in September 1961, keeping the post until the Conservatives lost power in the 1964 election. In the same year, the only occaision she was to ever to resist her parties line was to vote against the abolition of the birch as corporal punishment. Unusually, her maiden speech was in support of her Private Member's Bill to force local councils to hold meetings in public, which was successful.

She won the seat easily in the 1959 election and took her seat in the House of Commons. She had several other rejections before being selected for Finchley in April 1958. Thatcher had begun to look for a safe Conservative seat, and was narrowly rejected as candidate for Orpington in 1954. On returning to work, she specialised in tax issues.

She qualified as a Barrister in 1953, the same year that her twin children, Carol and Mark, were born. Denis was a wealthy businessman, and he funded his wife to read for the Bar. Her activity in the Conservative Party in Kent brought her into contact with Denis Thatcher; they fell in love and were married later in 1951. She fought the seat again in the 1951 election.

In the 1950 election she was the youngest woman Conservative candidate, and fought the safe Labour seat of Dartford. She was a member of the team that developed the first soft frozen ice cream. Lyons and Co., where she helped develop methods for preserving ice cream. She obtained a second-class degree and worked as a research chemist for British Xylonite and then J.

She became Chairman of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946, the third woman to hold the post. She did well at school, going to a girls' grammar school and then to Somerville College, Oxford from 1944, where she studied chemistry. Her mother was Beatrice Roberts, and she has a sister, Muriel. The Labour Party won control of Grantham Council in 1946 and used their political clout to oust Roberts as an Alderman in 1952, a result that affected his daughter deeply.

While officially described as 'Liberal Independent', in practice he supported the local Conservatives. Her father was Alfred Roberts, who ran a grocer's shop in the town and was active in local politics, serving as an Alderman. Thatcher was born Margaret Hilda Roberts in the town of Grantham in Lincolnshire in eastern England. .

In 1992 she was created Baroness Thatcher, and since then her direct political work has been as head of the Thatcher Foundation. Her leadership was challenged from within and she was forced to resign in 1990, her loss being due at least partly to inadequate advice and campaigning. At the same time the Conservative Party began to split over her sceptical approach to European Economic and Monetary Union. Her popularity finally declined when she replaced the unpopular local government rates tax with the even less popular Community Charge, more commonly (if misleadingly) known as the poll tax.

Supporters of Margaret Thatcher assert that Thatcherite policies were responsible for this. However from the mid 1980s a period of sustained economic growth occurred that led to an improvement in the UK's economic performance. Exacerbated by the global recession of the early 1980s, her policies initially caused large-scale unemployment, especially in the industrial heartlands of northern England and the coalfields of South Wales, and increased wealth inequalities. She also aimed to cut back the welfare state and foster a more flexible labour market that would create jobs and could adapt to market conditions.

She curtailed the power of the trade unions, cut back the role of the state in business, dramatically expanded home ownership, and in so doing created a more entrepreneurial culture. The profound changes Thatcher set in motion as Prime Minister altered much of the economic and cultural landscape of the UK . Thatcher also dispatched a Royal Navy task force to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina in the Falklands War. In foreign relations, Thatcher maintained the "special relationship" with the United States, and formed a close bond with Ronald Reagan.

She was undefeated at the polls, winning the 1979, 1983 and 1987 general elections, and became the longest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th century. Thatcher served as Education Secretary in the government of Edward Heath from 1970 to 1974, and successfully challenged Heath for the Conservative leadership in 1975. Even before coming to power she was nicknamed the Iron Lady in Soviet propaganda (because of her vocal opposition to communism), an appellation that stuck. She is an elder stateswoman of the Conservative Party and the figurehead of a political philosophy that became known as Thatcherism, which involves reduced government spending, lower taxes and regulation, a monetarist policy, and a programme of privatisation of government-owned industries.

She won 3 successive general elections and was the last person to do this until Tony Blair in 2005. She is also the only woman to be in the latter position officially, though another has been the Acting Leader. The Right Honourable Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS (born October 13, 1925), is a British stateswoman and was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, also Leader of the Opposition from 1975, and the only woman to date to hold the former position. Fellow of the Royal Society.

Privy Counsellor. Order of Merit. Lady of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. The Right Honourable The Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS (April 22, 1995—).

The Right Honourable The Baroness Thatcher, OM, PC, FRS (June 26, 1992–April 22, 1995). The Right Honourable Lady Thatcher, OM, FRS (April 9, 1992–June 26, 1992). The Right Honourable Lady Thatcher, OM, FRS, MP (February 4, 1991–April 9, 1992). The Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher, OM, FRS, MP (December 7, 1990– February 4, 1991).

The Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher, FRS, MP (June 30, 1983-December 7, 1990). The Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher, MP (June 22, 1970–June 30, 1983). Denis Thatcher, MP (October 8, 1959–22 June 1970). Mrs.

Denis Thatcher (1951–October 8, 1959). Mrs. Miss Margaret Roberts (October 13, 1925–1951).