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撒彻尔夫人英文介绍?高分求撒彻尔夫人英文介绍.

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撒彻尔夫人英文介绍?
高分求撒彻尔夫人英文介绍.
撒彻尔夫人英文介绍?高分求撒彻尔夫人英文介绍.
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC (born October 13, 1925), former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, in office from 1979 to 1990. She was leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 until 1990. She is the only woman to have held the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Thatcher was the longest-serving British Prime Minister since Lord Salisbury and had the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century. She was the first woman to lead a major political party in the UK, and the first woman to have held any of the four great offices of state. Perhaps the most significant British politician in recent political history, she is also one of the most divisive, loved and loathed by citizens from across the political spectrum.
Early life and education
Thatcher was born in the town of Grantham in Lincolnshire, England. Her father, Alfred Roberts, owned a grocer's shop in the town and was active in local politics and religion, serving as an Alderman and Methodist lay preacher. Roberts came from a Liberal family but stood—as was then customary in local government—as an Independent. He lost his post as Alderman in 1952 after the Labour Party won its first majority on Grantham Council in 1950. He married Beatrice Roberts, née Stephenson, and they had two daughters (Thatcher and her older sister Muriel (1921-2004)). Thatcher was brought up a devout Methodist and has remained a Christian throughout her life.[1] Thatcher performed well academically, attending Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School and subsequently attending Somerville College, Oxford in 1944 to study Chemistry, specifically crystallography. She became President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946, the third woman to hold the post. She graduated with a degree and worked as a research chemist for British Xylonite and then J. Lyons and Co., where she helped develop methods for preserving ice cream. She was a member of the team that developed the first soft frozen ice cream. Thatcher was also a member of the Association of Scientific Workers.
Political career between 1950 and 1970
At the 1950 and 1951 elections, Margaret Roberts fought the safe Labour seat of Dartford, and was at the time the youngest ever female Conservative candidate for office. While active in the Conservative Party in Kent, she met Denis Thatcher, whom she married in 1951. Denis was a wealthy divorced businessman and he funded his wife's studies for the Bar. She qualified as a barrister in 1953, the same year that her twin children Carol and Mark were born. As a lawyer she specialised in tax law.
Thatcher then began to look for a safe Conservative seat and was narrowly rejected as candidate for Orpington in 1954. She had several other rejections before being selected for Finchley in April 1958. She won the seat easily in the 1959 election and took her seat in the House of Commons. Unusually, her maiden speech was in support of her Private Member's Bill (Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960) to force local councils to hold meetings in public, which was successful. In 1961 she went against the Conservative Party's official position by voting for the restoration of birching.
She was given early promotion to the front bench as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in September 1961, retaining the post until the Conservatives lost power in the 1964 election. 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. In this role she adopted the policy of allowing tenants to buy their Council Houses, an idea first developed by her colleague James Allason. The policy would prove popular.[2] She moved to the Shadow Treasury team after 1966.
Thatcher was one of few Conservative MPs to support Leo Abse's Bill to decriminalise male homosexuality, and she voted in favour of David Steel's Bill to legalise abortion. She supported retention of capital punishment and voted against loosening the divorce laws. Thatcher made her mark as a conference speaker in 1966, with a strong attack on the high-tax policies of the Labour Government as being steps "not only towards Socialism, but towards Communism". 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.
In Heath's Cabinet
When the Conservative party under Edward Heath won the 1970 general election, Thatcher became Secretary of State for Education and Science. In her first months in office, forced to administer a cut in the Education budget, she was responsible for the abolition of universal free milk for school-children aged seven to eleven (Labour had already abolished it for secondary schools). This provoked a storm of public protest, and led to one of the more unflattering names for her: "Thatcher Thatcher, Milk Snatcher". However, papers later released under the Thirty Year Rule show that she spoke against such a move in Cabinet, but was forced, due to the concept of collective responsibility, to implement the will of her fellow ministers.[3] She also successfully resisted the introduction of library book charges.
Her term was marked by support for several proposals for more local education authorities to close grammar schools and adopt comprehensive secondary education, even though this was widely perceived as a left-wing policy. Thatcher also saved the Open University from being abolished. The Chancellor Anthony Barber actually wanted to abolish it as a budget-cutting measure, for he viewed it as a gimmick by Harold Wilson. Thatcher believed it was a relatively inexpensive way of extending higher education and insisted that the University should experiment with admitting school-leavers as well as adults. In her memoirs, Thatcher wrote that she was not part of Heath's inner circle, and had little or no influence on the key government decisions outside her department.
After the Conservative defeat in February 1974, Heath appointed her Shadow Environment Secretary. In this position she promised to abolish the rating system that paid for local government services, which proved a popular policy within the Conservative Party.
As Leader of the Opposition
Margaret Thatcher as Leader of the Opposition in 1975
Margaret Thatcher as Leader of the Opposition in 1975
Thatcher agreed with Sir Keith Joseph and the CPS that the Heath Government had lost control of monetary policy — and had lost direction — following its 1972 U-turn. After her party lost the second election of 1974, Joseph decided to challenge Heath's leadership but later withdrew. Thatcher then decided that she would enter the race on behalf of the Josephite/CPS faction. Unexpectedly she out-polled Heath on the first ballot, forcing him to resign the leadership. On the second ballot, she defeated Heath's preferred successor William Whitelaw, by 146 votes to 79, and became Conservative Party leader on 11 February 1975. She appointed Whitelaw as her deputy. Heath remained bitter towards Thatcher to the end of his life for what he perceived as her disloyalty in standing against him.
On 19 January 1976, she made a speech in Kensington Town Hall in which she made a scathing attack on the Soviet Union. The most famous part of her speech ran:
"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 men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns."
In response, the Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda ("Red Star") gave her the nickname "Iron Lady", which was soon publicised by Radio Moscow. She took delight in the name and it soon became associated with her image as an unwavering and steadfast character.
Thatcher appointed many Heath supporters to the Shadow Cabinet, for she had won the leadership as an outsider and had little power base of her own within the party. One, James Prior got the vital brief of shadow Employment Secretary. Thatcher had to act cautiously to convert the Conservative Party to her monetarist beliefs. She reversed Heath's support for devolved government for Scotland. In an interview for Granada Television's World in Action programme in January 1978, she said "people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture", arousing particular controversy at the time.[4] She received 10,000 letters thanking her for raising the subject and the Conservatives gained a lead against Labour in the opinion polls, from both parties at 43% before the speech to 48% for Conservative and 39% for Labour immediately after.[5]
The Labour Government ran into difficulties with the industrial disputes, strikes, high unemployment, and collapsing public services during the winter of 1978-9, dubbed the 'Winter of Discontent'. The Conservatives used campaign posters with slogans such as "Labour Isn't Working" [6] to attack the government's record over unemployment and its over-regulation of the labour market.
James Callaghan's Labour government fell after a successful Motion of no confidence in spring 1979.
In the run up to the 1979 General Election, most opinion polls showed that voters preferred James Callaghan as Prime Minister even as the Conservative Party maintained a lead in the polls. The Conservatives would go on to win a 44-seat majority in the House of Commons and Margaret Thatcher became the United Kingdom's first female Prime Minister. On arriving at 10 Downing Street, she famously said, in a paraphrase of St. Francis of Assisi:
“ Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.