Who was the first lady presedent of England?

Question:

Who was the first lady presedent of England?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Dear Jitender,
I think that you must have mistaken PRIME MINISTER for PRESIDENT.As,England or UK has no presidents they have kings and queens only
So,coming to your first prime minister
here is what i know about that iron lady.....
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC (born Margaret Hilda Roberts on 13 October 1925) is a former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who was in office from 1979 to 1990. She was leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 until 1990. She is the first and to date only woman to have held the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Thatcher was the longest-serving British Prime Minister since Lord Salisbury and had the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century. She was the first woman to lead a major political party in the UK, and the first of only two women to have held any of the four great offices of state.

At the 1950 and 1951 elections, Margaret Roberts fought the safe Labour seat of Dartford, and was at the time the youngest ever female Conservative candidate for office. While active in the Conservative Party in Kent, she met Denis Thatcher, whom she married in 1951. Denis was a wealthy divorced businessman and he funded his wife's studies for the Bar. She qualified as a barrister in 1953, the same year that her twin children Carol and Mark were born. As a lawyer she specialised in tax law.

Thatcher then began to look for a safe Conservative seat and was narrowly rejected as candidate for Orpington in 1954. She had several other rejections before being selected for Finchley in April 1958. She won the seat easily in the 1959 election and took her seat in the House of Commons. Unusually, her maiden speech was in support of her Private Member's Bill (Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960) to force local councils to hold meetings in public, which was successful. In 1961 she went against the Conservative Party's official position by voting for the restoration of birching.

She was given early promotion to the front bench as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in September 1961, retaining the post until the Conservatives lost power in the 1964 election. When Sir Alec Douglas-Home stepped down Thatcher voted for Edward Heath in the leadership election over Reginald Maudling, and was rewarded with the job of Conservative spokesman on Housing and Land. In this role she adopted the policy of allowing tenants to buy their council houses, an idea first developed by her colleague James Allason. The policy would prove popular.[3] She moved to the Shadow Treasury team after 1966.

Thatcher was one of few Conservative MPs to support Leo Abse's Bill to decriminalise male homosexuality, and she voted in favour of David Steel's Bill to legalise abortion. She supported retention of capital punishment and voted against the relaxation of divorce laws. Thatcher made her mark as a conference speaker in 1966, with a strong attack on the high-tax policies of the Labour Government as being steps "not only towards Socialism, but towards Communism". She won promotion to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Fuel Spokesman in 1967, and was then promoted to shadow Transport and, finally, Education before the 1970 election.

1979–1983

Margaret Thatcher and Kenneth KaundaThatcher became Prime Minister on 4 May 1979, with a mandate to reverse the UK's economic decline and to reduce the role of the state in the economy. Thatcher was incensed by one contemporary view within the Civil Service, that its job was to manage the UK's decline from the days of Empire, and she wanted the country to assert a higher level of influence and leadership in international affairs. She was a philosophic soul-mate of Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 in the United States. Conservatism now became the dominant political philosophy in the major English-speaking nations, apart from Australia.

In 1981, a number of Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Irish National Liberation Army prisoners in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison (known in Northern Ireland as 'Long Kesh', its previous official name) went on hunger strike to regain the status of political prisoners, which had been revoked five years earlier under the preceding Labour government. Bobby Sands, the first of the strikers, was elected as a Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Fermanagh and South Tyrone a few weeks before he died. Thatcher refused at first to countenance a return to political status for republican prisoners, famously declaring "Crime is crime is crime; it is not political."[8] However, after nine more men had starved themselves to death and the strike had ended, some rights relating to political status were restored to paramilitary prisoners. Thatcher's public hard line on the treatment of paramilitaries was reinforced during the 1981 Iranian Embassy Siege where for the first time in 70 years British armed forces were authorised to use lethal force in Great Britain.

As a monetarist, Thatcher started out in her economic policy by increasing interest rates to slow the growth of the money supply and thus lower inflation. She had a preference for indirect taxation over taxes on income, and value added tax (VAT) was raised sharply to 15%, with a resultant actual short-term rise in inflation.[citation needed] These moves hit businesses -- especially the manufacturing sector -- and unemployment quickly passed two million, doubling the one million unemployed under the previous Labour government.

Political commentators harked back to the Heath Government's "U-turn" and speculated that Mrs Thatcher would follow suit, but she repudiated this approach at the 1980 Conservative Party conference, telling the party: "To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catch-phrase—the U-turn—I have only one thing to say: you turn if you want to; the Lady's not for turning."[9] That she meant what she said was confirmed in the 1981 budget, when, despite concerns expressed in an open letter from 364 leading economists,[10] taxes were increased in the middle of a recession. In January 1982, the inflation rate had dropped back to 8.6% from earlier highs of 18%, and interest rates were then allowed to fall. Unemployment continued to rise, reaching an official figure of 3.6 million — although the criteria for defining who was unemployed were amended allowing some to estimate that unemployment in fact hit 5 million. By 1983, manufacturing output had dropped 30% from 1978.

The Falklands
Main article: Falklands War
On 2 April 1982, a ruling military junta in Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory that Argentina had claimed since an 1830s dispute on their British settlement. Within days Thatcher sent a naval task force to recapture the islands. Despite the huge logistical difficulties the operation was a success, resulting in a wave of patriotic enthusiasm and support for her government at a time when Thatcher's popularity had been at an all-time low for a serving Prime Minister[citation needed], with Newsweek declaring "The Empire Strikes Back".

1983 General Election
The 'Falklands Factor', along with an economic recovery in early 1983, bolstered the government's popularity. The Labour party at this time had split, and there was a new challenge in the SDP-Liberal Alliance, formed by an electoral pact between the Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Party. However, this grouping failed to make its intended breakthrough, despite briefly holding an opinion poll lead.[citation needed] In the June 1983 general election, the Conservatives won 42.4% of the vote, the Labour party 27.6% and the Alliance 25.4% of the vote. Although the Conservatives' share of the vote had fallen slightly (1.5%) since 1979, Labour's vote had fallen by far more (9.3%) and in Britain's first past the post system, the Conservatives won a landslide victory. Under Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives now had an overall majority of 144 MPs.

Thatcher was committed to reducing the power of the trades unions. Several unions launched strikes in response to legislation introcuced to curb their power, but these actions eventually collapsed and gradually, Thatcher's reforms reduced the power and influence of the unions.

The confrontation over strikes carried out in 1984-85 by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in opposition to proposals to close a large number of mines proved decisive. Police tactics during the strikes came under criticism from civil libertarians,[citation needed] but the images of crowds of militant miners attempting to prevent other miners from working proved a shock even to some supporters of the strikes. A group of workers, resigned to the impending failure of the actions and worn down by months of protests, began to defy the Union's rulings, starting splinter groups and advising workers that returning to work was the only viable option. The Miners' Strike lasted a full year before the NUM leadership conceded without a deal. The Conservative government proceeded to close all but 15 of the country's pits, with the remaining 15 being sold off and privatised in 1994. The defeat of the miners' strike led to a long period of demoralization in the whole of the trade union movement.[citation needed]

In June 1984 Thatcher invited apartheid South Africa's president, P. W. Botha, and foreign minister, Pik Botha, to Chequers in an effort to stave off growing international pressure for the imposition of economic sanctions against South Africa, where Britain had invested heavily. She reportedly urged President Botha to end apartheid; to release Nelson Mandela; to halt the harassment of black dissidents; to stop the bombing of African National Congress (ANC) bases in front-line states; and to comply with UN Security Council resolutions and withdraw from Namibia.[11] However Botha ignored these demands. In an interview with Hugo Young for The Guardian in July 1986, Thatcher expressed her belief that economic sanctions against South Africa would be immoral because they would make thousands of black workers unemployed.[12]

On the early morning of 12 October 1984, the day before her 59th birthday, Thatcher escaped injury in the Brighton hotel bombing during the Conservative Party Conference when her hotel room was bombed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Five people died in the attack. A prominent member of the Cabinet, Norman Tebbit, was injured, and his wife Margaret was left paralysed. Thatcher herself would have been injured if not for the fact that she was delayed from using the bathroom (which suffered more damage than the room she was in at the time the IRA bomb detonated). Thatcher insisted that the conference open on time the next day and made her speech as planned in defiance of the bombers, a gesture which won widespread approval across the political spectrum.[13]

On 15 November 1985, Thatcher signed the Hillsborough Anglo-Irish Agreement with Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, the first time a British government gave the Republic of Ireland a say (albeit advisory) in the governance of Northern Ireland. The agreement was greeted with fury by Northern Irish unionists.

Thatcher's political and economic philosophy emphasised reduced state intervention, free markets, and entrepreneurialism. After the 1983 election, the Government sold off most of the large utilities, starting with British Telecom, which had been in public ownership since the late 1940s. Many people took advantage of share offers, although many sold their shares immediately for a quick profit and therefore the proportion of shares held by individuals rather than institutions did not increase. The policy of privatisation, while anathema to many on the left, has become synonymous with Thatcherism. Wider share-ownership and council house sales became known as "popular capitalism" to its supporters (a term coined by John Redwood).

In the Cold War, Mrs. Thatcher supported United States President Ronald Reagan's policies of deterrence against the Soviets. This contrasted with the policy of d㩴ente which the West had pursued during the 1970s, and caused friction with allies who still adhered to the idea of d㩴ente. US forces were permitted by Mrs. Thatcher to station nuclear cruise missiles at British bases, arousing mass protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. However, she later was the first Western leader to respond warmly to the rise of the future reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, declaring that she liked him and describing him as "a man we can do business with" after a meeting in 1984, three months before he came to power. This was a start of a move by the West back to a new d㩴ente with the USSR under Gorbachev's leadership, which coincided with the final erosion of Soviet power prior to its eventual collapse in 1991. Thatcher outlasted the Cold War, which ended in 1989, and those who share her views on it credit her with a part in the West's victory, by both the deterrence and d㩴ente postures.

In 1985, as a deliberate snub, the University of Oxford voted to refuse her an honorary degree in protest against her cuts in funding for higher education. [14] This award had always previously been given to all Prime Ministers who had been educated at Oxford.

Her liking for defence ties with the United States was demonstrated in the Westland affair when she acted with colleagues to allow the helicopter manufacturer Westland, a vital defence contractor, to refuse to link with the Italian firm Agusta in order for it to link with the management's preferred option, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation of the United States. Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine, who had pushed the Agusta deal, resigned in protest after this, and remained an influential critic and potential leadership challenger. He would eventually prove instrumental in Thatcher's fall in 1990.

In 1986, her government controversially abolished the Greater London Council (GLC), then led by the strongly left-wing Ken Livingstone, and six Metropolitan County Councils (MCCs). The government claimed this was an efficiency measure. However, Thatcher's opponents held that the move was politically motivated, as all of the abolished councils were controlled by Labour, had become powerful centres of opposition to her government, and were in favour of higher local government taxes and public spending. Several of them had however rendered themselves politically vulnerable by committing scarce public funds to causes widely seen as political and even extreme. [specify][citation needed]

Thatcher had two notable foreign policy successes in her second term.

In 1984, she visited China and signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration with Deng Xiaoping on 19 December, which committed the People's Republic of China to award Hong Kong the status of a "Special Administrative Region". Under the terms of the One Country, Two Systems agreement, China was obliged to leave Hong Kong's economic status unchanged after the handover on 1 July 1997 for a period of fifty years – until 2047.
At the Dublin European Council in November 1979, Mrs. Thatcher argued that the United Kingdom paid far more to the European Economic Community than it received in spending. She famously declared at the summit: "We are not asking the Community or anyone else for money. We are simply asking to have our own money back". Her arguments were successful and at the June 1984 Fontainbleau Summit, the EEC agreed on an annual rebate for the United Kingdom, amounting to 66% of the difference between Britain's EU contributions and receipts. This still remains in effect, although Tony Blair later agreed to significantly reduce the size of the rebate. It periodically causes political controversy among the members of the European Union.[citation needed]

1987–1990
By leading her party to victory in the 1987 general election with a 102 seat majority, riding an economic boom against a weak Labour opposition advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament, Margaret Thatcher became the longest continuously serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since Lord Liverpool (1812 to 1827). Most United Kingdom newspapers supported her—with the exception of The Daily Mirror, The Guardian and The Independent—and were rewarded with regular press briefings by her press secretary, Bernard Ingham. She was known as "Maggie" in the tabloids, and her opponents on their marches were given to chanting the slogan "Maggie Out!" Her unpopularity on the left is evident from the lyrics of several contemporary pop-music songs (see below: Margaret Thatcher in popular culture)

Though an early backer of decriminalization of male homosexuality (see above), Thatcher, at the 1987 Conservative party conference, issued the statement that "Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay". Backbench Conservative MPs and Peers had already begun a backlash against the 'promotion' of homosexuality and, in December 1987, the controversial 'Section 28' was added as an amendment to what became the Local Government Act 1988. This legislation has since been abolished by Tony Blair's Labour administration.

Thatcher, the former chemist, became publicly concerned with environmental issues in the late 1980s. In 1988, she made a major speech [15] accepting the problems of global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain.

At Bruges, Belgium, in 1988, Thatcher made a speech in which she outlined her opposition to proposals from the European Community for a federal structure and increasing centralisation of decision-making. Although she had supported British membership, Thatcher believed that the role of the EC should be limited to ensuring free trade and effective competition, and feared that new EC regulations would reverse the changes she was making in the UK: "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels". She was specifically against Economic and Monetary Union, through which a single currency would replace national currencies, and for which the EC was making preparations, now known as the euro and in force as legal tender since 2002 in twelve European countries. Britain has so far remained outside the so-called eurozone. The speech caused an outcry from other European leaders, and exposed for the first time the deep split that was emerging over European policy inside her Conservative Party.

Thatcher's popularity once again declined, in 1989, as the economy suffered from high interest rates imposed to temper a potentially unsustainable boom. She blamed her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, who had been following an economic policy which was a preparation for monetary union; in an interview for the Financial Times, in November 1987, Thatcher claimed not to have been told of this and did not approve.[16]

At a meeting before the Madrid European Community summit in June 1989, Lawson and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe forced Thatcher to agree to the circumstances under which she would join the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a preparation for monetary union and the abolishment of the Pound Sterling. At the meeting, they both claimed they would resign if their demands were not met.[17] Thatcher responded by demoting Howe and by listening more to her adviser Sir Alan Walters on economic matters. Lawson resigned that October, feeling that Thatcher had undermined him.

That November, Thatcher was challenged for the leadership of the Conservative Party by Sir Anthony Meyer. As Meyer was a virtually unknown backbench MP, he was viewed as a "stalking horse" candidate for more prominent members of the party. Thatcher easily defeated Meyer's challenge, but there were sixty ballot papers either cast for Meyer or abstaining, a surprisingly large number for a sitting Prime Minister. Her supporters in the Party, however, viewed the results as a success, claiming that after ten years as Prime Minister and with approximately 370 Conservative MPs voting, the opposition was surprisingly small.[18]

Thatcher's new system to replace local government taxes, outlined in the Conservative manifesto for the 1987 election, was introduced in Scotland in 1989 and in England and Wales in 1990. The rates were replaced by the Community Charge (more widely known as the "poll tax"), which applied the same amount to every individual resident, with discounts for low earners. This was to be the most universally unpopular policy of her premiership and had the effect of limiting the number of people on the electoral register.

Additional problems emerged when many of the tax rates set by local councils proved to be much higher than earlier predicted. Opponents of the Community Charge banded together to resist bailiffs and disrupt court hearings of Community Charge debtors. The Labour MP, Terry Fields, was jailed for 60 days for refusing on principle to pay his Community Charge. As the Prime Minister continued to refuse to compromise on the tax, up to 18 million people refused to pay,[citation needed] enforcement measures became increasingly draconian, and unrest mounted and culminated in a number of riots. The most serious of these happened in London on 31 March 1990, during a protest at Trafalgar Square, London, which more than 200,000 protesters attended. The huge unpopularity of the tax was seen as a major factor in Thatcher's downfall.[citation needed]

One of Thatcher's final acts in office was to put pressure on US President George H. W. Bush to deploy troops to the Middle East to drive Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait. Bush was somewhat apprehensive about the plan, but Thatcher's memoirs summarise her advice to him during a telephone conversation with the words, "this was no time to go wobbly!" [19]

On the Friday before the Conservative Party conference in October 1990, Thatcher ordered her new Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major to reduce interest rates by 1%. Major persuaded her that the only way to maintain monetary stability was to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism at the same time, despite not meeting the 'Madrid conditions'. The Conservative Party conference that year saw a large degree of unity; few who attended could have imagined that Mrs Thatcher had only a matter of weeks left in office