Margaret Thatcher

NOM :         RAIFAUD

Prénom:                Solen

N°ETU :         E176787K

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Il est interdit au candidat de signer sa copie ou de faire apparaître un signe distinctif.

UNIVERSITÉ DE NANTES

Session de Mai 2018

LICENCE : L1 LLCEr

PARCOURS : Monolingue anglais

UNITÉ D’ENSEIGNEMENT : Anglais Culture

CODE UE :  HCA2-3

 INTITULE DE L’ÉPREUVE : Civilisation

Note :           /20

Observations du correcteur :

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        Chosen as the leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, and Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1979, Margaret Thatcher gave on the October 10th, 1980 her ‘The lady’s not for turning’ speech at the Conservative Party Conference. She was the first woman to rule the Great Britain and the Conservatives, and despite the big controversy around this fact, she inspired a lot of women. Very popular during her first year as a PM, she started to be less appreciated during the second year. First, she faced the increasing of unemployment due to the taxes hiring, the industrial production decreasing, the inflation, which also caused the rise of poverty. She also received a lot of criticisms because of her plan for the nation, people didn’t think her way to lead this country was not the good way because the situation was even worse than before.

She used different approaches to the subject, which we will use as directions for this commentary. So first, Margaret Thatcher explains why the United Kingdom isn’t a healthy nation, and in a second part, she explains how she will deal with the UK economic and social issues.

        In the first place, Margaret Thatcher tries to find what was wrong in her nation, and why it isn’t a healthy society. First, she realises the important rising of unemployment and poverty, which cause a drop of purchasing power. People don’t have enough money, so they can’t buy a lot, which is very bad for the companies because they start to loose money too. It causes inflation, and a lot of tensions in the UK, with strikes, anger of the society, and a bad vision of the Prime Minister.  But we can guess that she was aware of the difficulties of her plan. Indeed, she claims that “The task in which the Government were engaged -to change the national attitude of mind- was the most challenging to face any British Administration since the war”(lines 1-2).

        What can explains that increase of the unemployment, is first the fact that the state gives too much money to its citizens, which M. Thatcher considers as “not being kind or compassionate or caring”(line 10). The UK gives more than it receives, and it doesn’t help the unemployed people or the companies that have pain to be competitive. Indeed, they don’t learn how to face their problems on their own, they are just able to use more money, but become dependant and need it more and more to live and face their issues. According to Margaret Thatcher there is no point to use this method because it was a fail in the past “They are asking us to do again the very thing that caused the problems in the first place. We have made this point repeatedly.” (lines -11-12).

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