Mayor wants to name it after Pedro Zerolo, gay

Spain's Left-wing Mayor has said she is planning to rename a Plaza currently dedicated to Margaret Thatcher after a former Socialist Party leader and gay rights activist.

Manuela Carmena, who took over from Madrid's former conservative mayor in May, said Thatcher's name was inappropriate because she was 'the Iron Lady who enslaved the workers'.

Her announcement comes just ten months after Mark Thatcher was invited to the Spanish capital to name the plaza after his mother and the former British Prime Minister.

Just ten months ago Mark Thatcher was invited to Madrid to dedicate this plaza to his late mother, Lady Thatcher, but now the city's new Left-wind mayor says she wants to rename it

Rather than the former British Prime Minsiter, Madrid mayor Manuela Carmena says she would like to name it after Pedro Zerolo, a Socialist and gay rights activist

According to the conservative blog Breitbart, Ms Carmena would like the square to be named after Pedro Zerolo, a former Spanish Socialist Party politician who died of cancer last month.

Mr Zerolo, who was also a gay rights activist, was born in Venezula to Spanish parents who were living there after being exiled by Franco's dictatorship, reports The Independent.

He returned to Europe as a young man to study law in Tenerife, before moving to Madrid, where he became a legal representative for the gay rights movement.

While working for the campaign groups, he also set up his own project aimed at helping some of Madrid's poorest living in 'barrios' - or slums - around the city.

In 2003 he was elected as a Socialist councilman to the Madrid city council, and from there rose to become an executive board member.

Following the legalisation of gay marriage in Spain in 2005, he became one of the first people to marry, wedding partner Jesus Santos at a church in the capital.

Ms Carmena said it was not appropriate for a square in Madrid to be named after 'the Iron Lady who enslaved the workers', and has pledged to change it

By comparison Thatcher was born the daughter of a grocery shop owner in Grantham, Lincolcnshire, and spent her early career as a chemist before training as a lawyer.

She then swapped to politics, and in 1959 was elected as the representative for Finchley.

She took over as leader of the Conservative Party in 1959, serving as Prime Minister from 1979 until being replaced by John Major in 1990.

She was first dubbed the Iron Lady by a Soviet journalist for her uncompromising political style, and the moniker stuck, later becoming a term of respect.

As well as removing Plaza Margaret Thatcher, Ms Carmena has pledged to end food poverty in the capital and stop home evictions which have increased since the recession.