Word: thatcherism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That final, cocky gesture was typical of Kinnock, who entered the campaign with a reputation as a political lightweight. In just over 3 1/2 years as Labor's leader he had rarely bested Thatcher in their almost weekly jousts during the Prime Minister's question time in the House of Commons, and he had been ridiculed for his often rambling and emotional speeches. He was criticized by radical leftists in the Labor Party for moving it too far toward the center. But his eloquent campaign attacks against Tory parsimony won him respect as a warm, compassionate leader. In one crowd...
Perhaps the major issue in the campaign was Thatcher's dream of a more prosperous, more assertive Britain in contrast to Labor's view of a country in crisis. It was Labor, however, that had presided over many of the country's frequent economic crises in the 1960s and '70s. By the time Thatcher arrived in 1979, Britain was saddled with a costly welfare state in which labor- management relations were mired in class conflict and industry was aging and inefficient. Since then, Thatcher has transformed Britain more dramatically than any Prime Minister since Clement Attlee, who presided over...
...Thatcher's concern for the emerging middle class contrasts with her distaste for organized labor. In the three decades before she took over, wildcat strikes had torn holes in the country's economy. Major trade unions were considered more powerful than the government, and labor unrest helped topple two Prime Ministers, Edward Heath in 1974 and James Callaghan in 1979. Thatcher changed all that. Starting in 1980 she pushed through legislation to limit picketing rights, ban secondary picketing and make national unions financially responsible for the actions of their members. She has taken on a number of the country...
...country's education system has slipped badly under Thatcher. Critics charge that spending has been cut 10% after inflation, and even her Minister for Information Technology, Geoffrey Pattie, complains that "schools are turning out dangerously high quotas of illiterate, delinquent unemployables." One Tory proposal is to take control of secondary and primary schools away from local councils, many of them Labor dominated, and give principals and school boards more power over their budgets...
...Under Thatcher the country has asserted itself more on the world stage than at any other time since the 1956 loss of the Suez Canal, an event widely regarded as the end of Britain's days as a major world power. She presided over the 1982 victory against Argentina in the Falklands war, and despite domestic opposition, pressed ahead with the modernization of Britain's aging Polaris nuclear submarine fleet, accepted U.S. cruise missiles on British soil and last year allowed U.S. F-111s to strike Libya from British air bases. Her visit to Moscow in April, during which...