JNN 10 Apr 2013 London : Britain’s first and only female Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher nicknamed as ‘Iron Lady’ has died of stroke at the age of 87, local media reported. The death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has unleashed a hail of street parties, and other joyful reactions across Britain. 

Her children Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother had died peacefully following a stroke this morning.

Margaret Thatcher was transformed from Grantham grocer’s daughter to 10 Downing Street, where she served as Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.

After winning a scholarship to Oxford, where she read chemistry, Margaret Roberts became fascinated by politics.

She was highly inspired by her father, who had been a councillor in Grantham, to try to secure a candidacy to be a Conservative MP.

In 1950 and 1951 elections, she made an attempt to win the safe Labour seat of Dartford, but in failure. However, if unsuccessful in politics, Margaret made a success in love in Dartford, when in 1951 she met and married her future husband, Denis Thatcher. They married, when she was 26 and he 36, and two years later she gave birth to twins, Carol and Mark.

In 1959, Margaret Thatcher was adopted for the Conservative seat of Finchley, and was returned to parliament for the first time at the election of that year. She held the seat until her retirement from the Commons in 1992.

In 1967, Conservative Party’s chief Edward Heath invited her to join his shadow cabinet and made her education secretary following his unexpected triumph over Harold Wilson in the 1970 general election. Margaret Thatcher was elected Conservative Party Leader in 1975.

By the end of March 1979, when the Callaghan government finally lost a Commons vote of confidence, and with the disaster of the Winter of Discontent still fresh in the memories of millions of Britons, Margaret Thatcher won the election on May 3 comfortably, ending up with an overall majority of 43.

Thatcher stormed into Downing Street on May 4, 1979, following a Conservative election campaign which focused on the economic paralysis of the nation during the so-called Winter of Discontent.

After becoming prime minister, Thatcher put reforming trade unions and restructuring the British economy top on her government’s agenda.

The structural change meant that millions were put on the dole, unemployment rising by 1982 to its highest – at over three million – since the slump of the 1930s. The Thatcher government, and notably its chief, became seriously unpopular.

When Argentina launched an attack to recapture Las Malvinas (the Falkland) Islands in April 1982 many thought that Britain either would not, or could not regain the already occupied territory.

However, for Margaret Thatcher, the Argentines were the most useful enemy, because when the Falklands war started Thatcher was still struggling with the consequences of the economic restructuring, and was enormously out of favour with the electorate. By the end of it she was a heroine to many and her victory at the next election was assured.

The second Thatcher mandate, with a Commons majority of 144, was enough to pursue even more radical reforms than in the first term.

By the time Thatcher won her third mandate in June 1987 she was considered as a go-between for her old friend [former U.S. President] Ronald Reagan with her new friend [former Soviet Union President] Mikhail Gorbachev, and with an eye to winning the Cold War.

Britain’s so-called ‘Iron Lady’ left Downing Street on November 28, 1990, in tears, for the last time. The “Iron Lady”, as she was nicknamed, was a deeply divisive figure, openly hated by many, especially those from industrial heartlands, which she sent to the wall.

She ended her 11-year premiership quite literally in tears, thrown out not by the voters but by the very Conservative MPs she had led to three successive general election victories.

In a show of the depth of public hatred against the former Conservative leader, hundreds of protesters gathered in Brixton, London and Glasgow to hold “Thatcher death parties” while similar parties were also planned in Liverpool, Newcastle and Manchester.

The public rejoicing was also clearly seen on the internet and elsewhere including among the members of the National Union of Students who cheered and applauded in their conference in Sheffield when they received the news of the former PM’s death.

On the streets, protesters held banners reading “Rejoice Thatcher is dead” while others said they are “here to celebrate the death of a woman with blood on her hands”.

Thatcher was never popular even when in power and she never won the votes of more than a third of the electorate because of her domestic policy of cuts and privatization leading to massive unemployment of up to three million people, which was unseen since the great depression of the 1930’s.

A protester in Glasgow said the celebrations are totally appropriate because Thatcher committed “economic crimes” in the 1980’s that devastated many families.

Her point was echoed by a member of the executive council of the Unite the Union in Glasgow Bryan Simpson who said they want to “point out that what she began is being continued by the Tories [PM David Cameron’s government] now”.

In England, David Hopper, general secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association, said her death was a “great day” for coal miners.

Paul Kenny, General Secretary of Britain’s general union GMB, also paid his share of condemnation of Thatcher saying “her legacy involves the destruction of communities, the elevation of personal greed over social values and legitimizing the exploitation of the weak by the strong”.

People were also busy on the internet, making jokes about Thatcher’s death and tapping into their creativity to show their delight of the occasion.

An e-petition has been launched on the official government petitions website poking fun at Thatcher’s privatization policy and the government’s decision to hold a state funeral for her.

“In keeping with the great lady’s legacy, Margaret Thatcher’s state funeral should be funded and managed by the private sector to offer the best value and choice for end users and other stakeholders,” the petition, which has so far gathered 33,000 signatures, read.

The public pleasure was also seen on Twitter with political comic Jamie Kilstein writing “To honor Thatcher I will punch a poor person and to spite her, hug a coal miner”.

Another comedian Mick Ferry wrote “Maggie [Margaret Thatcher] is now working on a plan to privatize Hell” while political journalist Seumas Milne wrote called for “no state funeral for the most socially destructive prime minister of modern times”.

Milne also tweeted that demands for “respectful silence” from “victims and critics of Thatcher” are “not only misguided but dangerous”.

The apparently endless wave of delight among Britons for Thatcher’s death was completed by tens of thousands of likes and shares on Facebook and Twitter of a website set up three years ago.

The website “Is Margaret Thatcher Dead Yet?”, which was updated with the word “Yes” boldly added to the front page after the former British PM’s death, faced a rush of likes and shares. It has so far collected more than 224,000 Facebook likes and nearly 15,000 likes on Twitter.

The controversial former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was influential in a set of major political upheavals at the time of her premiership in the 1980’s, which openly contradict the image of a reformist neoliberal political leader the current British government is trumpeting

Thatcher was one of the main supporters of toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam during the Iraqi-imposed war on Iran in the 1980’s.

Despite her government being officially neutral in the Iran-Iraq war, and having voted for a UN Security Council resolution calling on all countries not to further escalate the conflict, she was hungry for selling arms to Saddam’s government.

Secret files made public in December 2011 unveiled an exhaustive list of equipment from Hawk fighter jets to military air and naval bases that London was attempting to sell the Iraqi regime as early as 1981 under the pretext that they were “non-lethal”.

Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait almost certainly never would have happened without American and British support for Iraq during the 1980’s.

The 1990 invasion would have not led to the Persian Gulf War against Iraq, either, if Thatcher had not persuaded the then US president George Bush to intervene militarily in their August 2, 1990 meeting in Aspen, Colorado.

Before the meeting Bush had told reporters: “We’re not contemplating intervention” while he came out of the meeting telling reporters that he was considering “the next steps needed to end the invasion”, by which he meant the first Persian Gulf War that started two months after Thatcher left office.

Later in 2002, she directly influenced former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to go to the war in Iraq by her July 17, article in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Don’t Go Wobbly”, in which she said: “It is clear to anyone willing to face reality that the only reason Saddam took the risk of refusing to submit his activities to U.N. inspectors was that he is exerting every muscle to build WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction)”.

Blair and George W. Bush used the very pretext of weapons of mass destruction to invade Iraq though such weapons were never found.

Thatcher also had an appetite for supporting blood-thirsty dictators such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Indonesia’s General Suharto along with Iraq’s Saddam.

Thatcher called Suharto as “one of our very best and most valuable friends”.

She also worked closely with Pinochet during the Falkland War of the 1982 and praised him for “bringing democracy to Chile” during a visit with him in March 1999 while the former Chilean dictator was under house arrest.

The so-called “Iron Lady” was no less lethal to Britain’s own people in political terms especially in Northern Ireland.

Her government oversaw the hunger strikes of 1981 in Northern Ireland by anti-British republicans, in which as Sinn Fein current President Gerry Adams said, she tried in vain to “to criminalize the republican struggle and the political prisoners”.

“Margaret Thatcher will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and 81. Her Irish policy failed miserably,” Adams said.

Adams also pointed to two other darkest aspects of her foreign policy that is her support for the Khmer Rouge, who are accused of killing an estimated 1.7 million people during their rule over Cambodia, and her staunch backing for the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa.

Her position on the South African revolution leader Nelson Mandela serves as a round-up on her political views.

In 1987 she described the African National Congress as “a typical terrorist Organisation” saying it would never be able to run South. She also condemned Nelson Mandela, the then imprisoned ANC leader, as a terrorist.