Thatcher died in 2013.
A statue of the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher looks set to be placed on a 10ft-high platform to stop vandals targeting it, police say.
The proposed £300,000 statue of the former Tory leader is set to be built in her home town of Grantham, Lincolnshire.
The development will be voted on next week by the South Kesteven District Council’s Development Management Committee.
However, there are concerns that the new statue could become a “likely target for politically-motivated vandals”. In an effort to deter vandals, police are also encouraging lights to be added to the area and for CCTV cameras to be installed.
As reported by Sky News, a police report based on the threat assessment said: “The divisive nature of Baroness Thatcher due to her political career and policy legacy and the potential for this to result in vandalism has been raised as a concern.
“Margaret Thatcher does however maintain an element of emblematic significance to many on the left and the passage of time does seem to have diminished that intensity of feeling. In general there remains a motivated far-left movement across the UK (though not so much in Lincolnshire) who may be committed to public activism.”
During her tenure in Downing Street, Thatcher was an extremely divisive leader despite the fact that she was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century.
In strictly economic terms, she favoured deregulation, flexible labour markets, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. These policies made her deeply unpopular with large sections of British workers.
With regards to her foreign policy and Ireland, her handling of the hunger strikes was widely criticised as she refused to grant them the status of political prisoners. Ultimately, the 1981 hunger strike was called off after ten prisoners had starved themselves to death — including Bobby Sands.
At the time, she stated that: “We are not prepared to consider special category status for certain groups of people serving sentences for crime. Crime is crime is crime, it is not political.”
Three years later, the IRA bombed a hotel in Brighton that Thatcher was staying in ahead of a scheduled Tory conference. She survived that attack but five people died.
However, she also co-signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which marked the first time a British government had given the Republic of Ireland an advisory role in the governance of Northern Ireland.
She died on 8 April, 2013.
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