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alp227

(31,962 posts)
Wed Apr 10, 2013, 01:36 PM Apr 2013

Cameron Opens Debate on Thatcher Legacy

Source: NYT

As divided Britons sought to define Margaret Thatcher’s contentious and transformative legacy, Prime Minister David Cameron lauded her on Wednesday as a woman who had broken through Britain’s glass ceiling from her beginnings as the daughter of a greengrocer to make Britain “great again.”

Mr. Cameron was speaking at the start of what was likely to be a protracted debate in Parliament to commemorate Mrs. Thatcher, who died on Monday at the age of 87 and is widely seen as one of the most abrasive and influential figures of modern British history.

As much as the verbal tribute, the debate reflected the long reach of her radical policies, which reshaped Britain in the 1980s. In Parliament, even her ideological adversaries acknowledged her stature on Wednesday despite the fact that her free-market policies on labor unions, taxation and the economy divided the land and provoked strikes and riots.

At the same time, her staunchest supporters, like Mr. Cameron, acknowledged that her role as a “conviction politician” meant that “her political story was a perpetual battle” in the country, within Parliament and sometimes within her own cabinet.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/world/europe/british-lawmakers-margaret-thatcher-legacy.html?pagewanted=all

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