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The British monarch ascended the British throne at a time when Britain held on to much of its empire and was emerging from the ravages of World War II. 70 years later, she died in the midst of a burgeoning recession caused by the war in Ukraine.
Perhaps Queen Elizabeth of England’s greatest achievement was maintaining the popularity of the monarchy through decades of political, social and economic change as the UK struggled to find its place in a new world order.
Today this nation is the sixth largest economy in the world, recently separated from the European Union, and one of the main financial centers. But it has taken seven decades for Elizabeth II to witness that transformation.
When he came to the throne in the early 1950s, Britain was still subject to food rationing that persisted despite the end of World War II. Since then, the country has undergone a dramatic change.
The austere postwar 1950s gave way to the turbulent 1960s and then to the divisive and reformist leadership of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, one of the most important events of which was the miners’ strike of 1984 and 1985, which sparked a fierce union opposition to his economic policies.
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Around the 1990s, specifically in 1992, after a fire devoured part of Windsor Castle, the monarch and her family decided to start paying income tax like any ordinary Briton. Two years later, she inaugurated the tunnel under the English Channel that connects the United Kingdom with the European continent.
It would take 14 years for the queen to see the huge global economic downturn of 2008 and 2009, when Britain suffered its worst crisis since the 1930s. After a virtual collapse of banking, the government launched millionaire lifelines as it sought new ways to boost an economy weighed down by the crisis.
Its next great economic moment would come in 2020. On January 23, the queen sanctioned the Brexit law and the following day the former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, signed the agreement for the United Kingdom to leave the community bloc.
That same year, the Covid-19 pandemic hit the United Kingdom hard, triggering an economic crisis that some dared to classify as “worse” than that of 2008.
The last thing Elizabeth II had to do with her life was how the United Kingdom is one of the most affected countries in the region with the war in Ukraine, with skyrocketing prices and an incipient recession caused by the extremely high energy rates.
With Reuters, AP and EFE
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