Margret Thatcher: Great Britain's First Female Prime Minister

Margret Thatcher was Great Britain’s first female prime minister who served three consecutive terms in office. She was also one of the dominant political figures of 20th century Britain. According to the BBC, Margret Thatcher changed the British country during her time in the office; in fact, she reduced the influence of trade unions, scaled back public benefits, privatized certain industries and changed the terms of political debate . However, the news of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013 was met a mixture of sadness and rejoicing by the British people. Why was Thatcher respected by some, but hated by others?
Firstly, Margret Thatcher was hated for several reasons, for instance, cutting the school milk. In order to understand why she did what she did, it is necessary to look back when she was education secretary. In 1971 while she was the education secretary, the government

had to cut school funding by $300 million. Thatcher did not want to cut anything that had to do with the student missing out of the education; therefore, her solution was to remove free school milk from the lower grades. As a result, in 1985, she was refused an honorary degree from Oxford University. She also got the nickname “Milk snatcher.” Several of people disliked her solution because their kids would not get free milk at the school and therefore they needed to buy their kids milk every day, this coasted the working class a lot. At that time, the milk was very important to everyone because it contained lots of energies and vitamins.
In addition, while Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, she worked to privatize everything; she privatized many industries, for instance, British Telecom. Several people did not like this, especially those who was in the working class because they lost all their work. Not only did the privatizing make the working class poor, but it also made the British society divided and you could clearly see the differences between the working and middle class. However, the middle class thought that it was a good idea to privatize the industries because they already had money to survive on, unlike the working class. The poverty went up and according to these figures from the institute for Fiscal studies 13, 4% of the population lived below 60% of media incomes
Even though Thatcher has made many poor decisions for Britain, some people thought and still think that she was a wonderful prime minister to Britain. Firstly, she inspired a generation, and mostly the women. At that time, being a female leader was unusual, however, Thatcher showed everyone that being a woman does not mean you are weak, and you can do everything you want if you just set your mind into it.
Secondly, she took the Falkland Islands back after Argentina invaded it in April 1982.

According to the movie, “The iron lady” a lot of the people did not agree with her sending many soldiers to the Falkland Islands to fight against the Argentines soldiers because it was not necessary. However, they thought that Thatcher could negotiate with them. Thatcher never listened to them and just sent the soldiers to fight. Several people died, but at the end of it, Britain won the war. Therefore, many people respected her choice and thought that it was a very good idea to send soldiers, because if not, they would have never gotten the Islands back.
To sum briefly, Margret Thatcher did many positive things to the British country, as well as bad things. On the one hand, she fought for her country, regardless of how much it would cost the country, for instance taking back the Falkland Islands. On the other hand, she changed people’s view on women and she was part of making Britain what it is today. However, she was also responsible for high unemployment, poverty and a divide in the social

classes.