Word: thatchers
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...hardest-hit consumers are the tens of thousands who are stuck with the all-electric homes that the utilities promoted so heavily until the early 1970s. Many of these residents complain that their electricity bills now exceed their mortgage payments. For example, in Union Bridge, Md., Dale and Karen Thatcher are strapped by their latest two-month bill of $572 for their all-electric, seven-room farmhouse. They have unplugged the freezer and the TV, turned down the thermostat to 60° and swaddled themselves in heavy sweaters in a desperate attempt to economize...
...like a dream, that the next name in the lists after Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Edward Heath is Margaret Thatcher." With those uncharacteristically emotional words, the coolly competent M.P. for Finchley accepted her triumph as the first woman ever to head a political party in Britain. Winning seven votes more than the mandatory majority of 139, Mrs. Thatcher, who had toppled former Prime Minister Edward Heath from his ten-year reign as Conservative Party chief the week before, soundly defeated a formidable array of four male challengers. Her leading opponent, Party Chairman William Whitelaw, drew only...
...Thatcher finally reached Cabinet rank in 1970, when Heath named her Minister of Education and Science. She survived nearly four stormy years in the post, upholding the then unfashionable principle of meritocracy against the open-enrollment school policies established by the Labor governments of the '60s. In one furiously criticized venture, she raised the price of school lunches and cut off the free milk rations for some 3.5 million children, earning for herself the bitter playground chant, "Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher." The $20.7 million per year that she thus saved was used to help finance an ambitious educational-reform...
...recent months, Mrs. Thatcher has become the Conservatives' principal frontbench spokesman on economic and tax policy. A feisty debater, she has repeatedly discomfited Labor ministers with relentlessly logical and prodigiously well-informed attacks. Her continuous salvos against the Wilson government's proposals for higher tax rates on inherited wealth finally provoked Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey to call her "La Pasionaria of Privilege."* Mrs. Thatcher's rejoinder: "Some Chancellors are macroeconomic, some are fiscal; this one is just plain cheap...
...perhaps some support-from the left and center as well. The energy apparent in her spirited, sure-footed performances in the House has injected new life into a flagging party. After Heath's lackluster performance for most of last year, this vigor alone accounts for much of Mrs. Thatcher's appeal. "I just make lists of things to do and get a lot of pleasure in ticking them off," she once explained. And she has a long, long list...