BBC News with Charles Carroll.
The former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has died in London at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke. Lady Thatcher transformed British politics after becoming Britain’s first woman prime minister in 1979. Her current successor, David Cameron, said she took a country that was on its knees and made it stand tall again. And the London mayor, Boris Johnson, said she challenged many of the established orthodoxies of the time.
"She was overwhelmingly right in her judgements. She was right about the unions. She was right about the threat of Soviet communism and I think she’d proved overwhelmingly right about the euro. She took on that cosy, clubby male-dominated consensus and she won.”
But Lady Thatcher’s radical policies divided Britain and more than 20 years later have polarised views of her legacy. She curbed the powers of trade unions, fought and won a bitter year-long strike with coal miners. Alan Cummings of the Durham Miners’ Association said some mining communities never recovered.
"A lot of people hated the woman, hated what she stood for, hated what she did to us. She has a legacy: a legacy of destruction, a legacy of destroying lives, a legacy of destroying communities.”
Margaret Thatcher, known as the Iron Lady, did much to reassert British influence on the international stage. She had a close relationship with the then American President Ronald Reagan over the ending of the Cold War and helped convince his successor George Bush Sr to attack Iraq. Lady Thatcher herself seized back the Falkland Islands invaded by Argentina in 1982. She opposed apartheid, but stood against the imposition of Commonwealth sanctions against South Africa and she fiercely defended Britain’s position in the European Union.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, who in 2005 became the first female president of an African country, said that Lady Thatcher inspired women to enter politics.
"I think she was a role model because she came at a time when women participation and women leadership was in scarce supply. And so she had to, to take second decision. She had to act the role not so much as a woman, but she had to act as a leader. And because of her, many of us were inspired, inspired to be strong, inspired to follow her footsteps in leadership.”
In France, reaction to Lady Thatcher’s death has been more guarded than in many other countries. Hugh Schofield reports from Paris.
In France, in most circles, Thatcherism remains a bad word, the same as ultra-liberalism. So the country’s leaders have had to pick their way carefully through the tributes. President Hollande said that she’d been a great patriot, and that her relation to France had always been frank and loyal. But the Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault spoke for many when he said that the Thatcher years had caused much economic and social damage with liberalisation carried to excess and the undermining of public services whose consequences we see today.
World News from the BBC.
In other news, the Syrian government says it will not allow a United Nations team of chemical weapons experts into the country. Last month Damascus asked the UN to investigate one alleged chemical weapons attack which it claimed was carried out by rebels. Today the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon suggested all reports about the use of such weapons should be examined and that a team of specialists was awaiting deployment.
Military officials in Pakistan say at least 30 soldiers and almost 100 militants have been killed in several days of fierce fighting in the Tirah Valley in north-western Pakistan. The officials said the army had taken control of large parts of the region from the Pakistani Taliban and their allies since it began a ground offensive last Friday.
For more now on our main news-- the death of Margaret Thatcher. With a look at the economic aspects of her legacy, here’s Andrew Walker.
Baroness Thatcher’s time as prime minister marked a dramatic change in strategy. She wanted a central role for the private sector in the market economy and wanted to reduce the role of the state by cutting public spending. Her government began a programme of privatising state-owned businesses, selling them off sometimes to the stock market in an effort to promote wider share-ownership. There was legislation to reduce the power of trade unions and controlling inflation was given a central role. Under her leadership, restrictions on the financial sector were swept away, a reform known as Big Bang. In some respects, the economic legacy is controversial. The reduction in inflation arguably came at the cost of a period of high unemployment and critics say the liberalisation of finance sowed the seeds for the recent crisis. But there are aspects of Baroness Thatcher’s reforms that endure, notably the privatisations and the importance attached to keeping inflation under control. Several elements of the approach have subsequently been followed in many developed and emerging economies.
Andrew Walker.