'A heroine and a hate figure' - for better or worse, Baroness Thatcher remade our nation
Publié
par
Clifford Armion
le 04/09/2013
Activer le mode zenAndreas W Smith
Baroness Thatcher, Britain’s longest-serving prime minister since Queen Victoria was on the throne, has died in the Ritz hotel at the age of 87. She had been ill for some time and barely been seen in public life for a decade. While a heroine for many people, she was equally a hate figure for others. Indifference wasn’t an option.She was one of the two great prime ministers that the United Kingdom has had since the Second World War. The first was the Labour Party leader, Clement Attlee (1945 to 1951). The Conservative Party broadly accepted what Attlee had done until Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) challenged the post-war settlement. Attlee had founded the welfare state, created the National Health Service and nationalised major industries and public utilities. The NHS remained inviolate but one of Mrs Thatcher’s first actions as Prime Minister in 1979 was to give council tenants the right to buy their council houses at a discount. Over a million were sold before she left office. And denationalisation, or “privatisation” as Mrs Thatcher called it, was one of the most prominent aspects of her period in 10 Downing Street. Indeed we largely live in Thatcher’s Britain.
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Pour citer cette ressource :
"'A heroine and a hate figure' - for better or worse, Baroness Thatcher remade our nation", La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), septembre 2013. Consulté le 20/04/2024. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/archives/archives-revue-de-presse/a-heroine-and-a-hate-figure-for-better-or-worse-baroness-thatcher-remade-our-nation