There is No Alternative Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  A NOTE ON STYLE AND SOURCES

  Preface

  PREFACE TO THE PREVIOUS EDITION

  Chapter 1 - The Shrine of Mother Margaret

  Chapter 2 - La Pasionaria of Middle-Class Privilege

  Chapter 3 - “I Hate Communists”

  Chapter 4 - Diva, Matron, Housewife, Shrew

  Chapter 5 - The Sledgehammer

  Chapter 6 - For Strategic Sheep Purposes

  INVASION! - The Sun, reporting the British recapture of South Georgia

  A PUNCH UP YOUR JUNTA! - Sunday People, reporting raids on Port Stanley

  GOTCHA! - The Sun, reporting the sinking of the Belgrano

  STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA! - The Sun, urging rejection of the Peruvian peace proposal

  KILL AN ARGIE AND WIN A METRO - —Private Eye

  HERE IT COMES, SENORS! - —The Sun, caption to a photo of a missile signed Up ...

  THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK - —Newsweek

  Chapter 7 - Coal and Iron

  Chapter 8 - Miners Is Miners

  Chapter 9 - The Triumvirate

  Chapter 10 - No! No! No!

  CONCLUSION

  EPILOGUE

  PHOTOGRAPH ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Acknowledgments

  A GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR

  Claire Berlinski’s There Is No Alternative

  “Often entertaining and sometimes illuminating . . . idiosyncratic and interesting . . . Berlinski’s judgments are thoughtful, particularly her central insight that what underlay Lady Thatcher’s hatred of socialism was not only that she found it economically inefficient, or that communist regimes had drenched the world in blood, but that she believed it was morally corrupting.”

  —Financial Times

  “Fresh, original and extremely well-written.”

  —Washington Times

  “Claire Berlinski has written a much better book about her than one of those door-stop biographies that are now the destiny of almost every public figure. . . . The book is all the better for being a work of synthesis as well as analysis. Without being hagiography, it is about as powerful a defence of Thatcher’s record as is likely ever to be written.”

  —Globe and Mail (Toronto)

  “Berlinski has crawled through the archives and interviewed many of the principals of the Thatcher era. . . . She asks the pertinent and the impertinent questions and challenges the assumptions of the players and their own conclusions about what happened and why.”

  —World Affairs

  “Entertaining. . . . Berlinski often expresses herself with verve. . . . Berlinski’s account of the case for free markets is—as a primer for the non-economist—lucid and lively. . . . She’s colorful—thanks in part to some enjoyable inside track from Charles Powell—about Thatcher’s relationships with Gorbachev and Reagan.”

  —American Conservative

  “Berlinski, who has written insightfully about the threat of Islamic fundamentalism . . . shows now how capable statesmanship can redirect history’s seemingly irreversible tide.”

  —Claremont Review

  “[An] excellent look back at Margaret Thatcher’s significance.”

  —Human Events

  “Berlinski shows commitment and energy as an author . . . Her encounters with Neil Kinnock are tactical masterpieces, where she draws the Welsh windbag out and then deflates his woolly thinking with as much cool, perhaps cruel, precision as Thatcher herself did.”

  —The Scotsman

  “Berlinski argues for the enduring importance of Thatcher by casting her as the great scourge of socialism at a time when financial crises have led many governments to take a larger role in controlling their economies. Everywhere we turn these days, the state is advancing and private initiative is discouraged and denigrated. But that’s only for now. Thatcher proved socialism’s gains aren’t irreversible by trampling them underfoot.”

  —Regulation: The Cato Review of Business and Government

  “Claire Berlinski’s There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters is a delightful biography of a prime minister who charmed visiting leaders with her feet curled up under her. Berlinski’s writing is also charmingly unconventional: Instead of ruthlessly cutting to stay on topic, she shows personalities by displaying dinner table repartee and dining choices.”

  —World Magazine

  “For delightful reading, few biographers or historians can match this book. Why Margaret Thatcher Matters is equal parts of each genre. . . . Claire Berlinski’s prose sparkles with wit, insight, and charm. There is little doubt that those attributes helped to lubricate the many interviews she conducted with Thatcher’s friends and enemies, and with those affected by her policies. Berlinski is clearly enthralled by her subject, but she is not blind to Thatcher’s failings.”

  —American Thinker

  “Where Berlinski stands out—the real added value of her account of Thatcherism compared to others—is her elaboration of how, above and beyond all else, it was a moral crusade.”

  —British Politics Group Quarterly

  “Claire Berlinski has written one of the finest biographies of 2008 . . . Superbly written . . . There Is No Alternative should be read by anyone wanting to understand geo-economics and party politics . . . A masterpiece.”

  —Scoffery.com

  “The lesson of Berlinski’s timely book is that capable statesmanship can redirect history’s seemingly irreversible tide.”

  —PowerLine blog

  “Claire Berlinski’s insight into Margaret Thatcher’s character makes this book fascinating, and her intellectual seriousness and rigor make it compelling. It is a perfect marriage of author and subject: Berlinski’s Thatcher is painfully real and human, yet simultaneously larger-than-life.”

  —General Brent Scowcroft,

  author of America and the World

  “Finally the Iron Lady gets her due. Claire Berlinski brilliantly lays out how Margaret Thatcher’s strength and conviction changed the world. Without a Prime Minister Thatcher there might not have been a President Ronald Reagan. And Berlinski reminds us how the whole world would benefit from a new Thatcher today.”

  —Peter Schweizer, author of Reagan’s War

  FOR

  MISCHA and CRISTINA

  Boudicea, with her daughters before her in a chariot, went up to tribe after tribe, protesting that it was indeed usual for Britons to fight under the leadership of women. “But now,” she said, “it is not as a woman descended from noble ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters. Roman lust has gone so far that not our very persons, nor even age or virginity, are left unpolluted. But heaven is on the side of a righteous vengeance; a legion which dared to fight has perished; the rest are hiding themselves in their camp, or are thinking anxiously of flight. They will not sustain even the din and the shout of so many thousands, much less our charge and our blows. If you weigh well the strength of the armies, and the causes of the war, you will see that in this battle you must conquer or die. This is a woman’s resolve; as for men, they may live and be slaves.”

  —ANNALS OF TACITUS, BOOK XIV

  A NOTE ON STYLE AND SOURCES

  Thanks to the Margaret Thatcher Foundation—to whom every scholar of Thatcher is indebted—much of the archival material to which I refer in this book is now online. Many of the speeches and interviews I describe are on YouTube. Where possible, I have tried to guide the reader to original documents, video clips, audio files, and photographs on the Internet. On
my Web site, www.berlinski.com, you may listen to samples of my interviews with Thatcher’s friends and enemies. I encourage the reader to think of this as a multimedia book and to treat my notes as hyperlinks. This is why I have used footnotes, not endnotes. I don’t want to hunt and rifle through endnotes while I’m reading. I don’t know why anyone else would.

  The use of ellipses in quoted text indicates that I have shortened a quotation, but readers who wish to consult my unedited interviews will be able to do so. Following the paperback publication of this book, I will donate my recordings and transcripts to the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. I will also give them to the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, where they will join the Thatcher Papers.

  For consistency, I have changed British to American spelling, even when quoting British source material, although I have not changed proper names (such as the “British Labour Party”). For brevity, and because British honorifics are generally meaningless to Americans, I have mostly eschewed them—I refer, for example, to “Thatcher” rather than “Lady Thatcher,” or “Baroness Thatcher” as she has in turn been titled. I mean no disrespect by this, only warm American informality and an eagerness to get straight to the point.

  PREFACE TO THE 2011 EDITION

  I wrote much of this book in 2007. Then, as now, Republican presidential candidates were eager to associate themselves with Margaret Thatcher’s name.

  Not long after I wrote the last sentence of the book, the financial meltdown began. The global economy is now sunk in a deep, prolonged recession, one so severe that many are asking whether the Left has been right about free markets all along. Even I have been tempted to wonder.

  We all know the grim statistics. The United States now has the weakest job market since the Great Depression. Five million potential workers have left the labor force since 2007. The duration of unemployment has risen to record lengths. Many Americans were stunned and humiliated by the credit downgrade, but the downgrade reflected the facts.

  In 2010—for the first time—the United States fell from the ranks of the economically “free” to “mostly free,” according to the Index of Economic Freedom. There have been “notable decreases in financial freedom, monetary freedom, and property rights,” the report observed.

  As for Western Europe, those of us who have noted for years that its massive pension liabilities and social welfare programs could not be sustained, particularly given its demography, at least have the satisfaction of saying, “We told you so.” But no one really wanted to be so right about that. That Europe’s monetary policy has failed is now completely obvious. The economic collapse in the periphery countries—Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain—is threatening to envelop the center. The rot and corruption in the peripheral states had only been disguised by debt accumulation.

  It is hard to imagine a worse time, geopolitically, for the West and its ideals to look, literally, bankrupt, or for America to be so pathologically absorbed with its own problems. It is assuredly immensely dangerous.

  Although it is politically predictable to put all the blame for this on Obama, it is also absurd. In retrospect, it is clear these problems have been decades in the making. In the past decade, in particular, Congresses and Presidents alike have assented to a surge of spending—the bulk of it non-defense spending.

  Given the eerie similarity between the mood in America now and the mood in Britain at the time Margaret Thatcher came to power, perhaps there will now be a wider curiosity about who she really was and what she really achieved.

  I have heard countless times since this book was published that America “needs a Margaret Thatcher.” I am often asked if an American politician—so long as he is a Republican or he is a she—is “the next Thatcher,” and I am told just as often that Thatcherism has been discredited by the world’s recent economic travails. It is quite rare, however, that I meet anyone who knows all that much about her beyond having a strong feeling of some kind. That is a source of some frustration to me. In pessimistic moments, I worry that the lack of eagerness to explore her real record in depth might be evidence that slogans and entertainment have not merely supplemented but replaced all political thought, and that this might be, inevitably, the fate of all free societies. In more optimistic moments, I notice that, for slogans and entertainment, America is absolutely unrivalled—and for sure, no one else in the world is thinking more deeply about anything.

  But there is no hope of defending—or criticizing—Thatcher’s record in a serious way, or learning anything from her story that might truly be useful, if one is defending or criticizing a mythical caricature. When I am breezily assured by Americans that feral youths and rioters would not have dared to torch a British city had Thatcher been in power, I can only say that they’re entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. To adopt Thatcher as a heroine without realizing that her first years in power were disastrous, that city after city went up in flames, that only extraordinary luck kept her in office at all, suggests a worrying indifference to history and to truth. It hints, too, at a longing for authoritarianism rather than for principled—or pragmatic—conservative leadership. That political discourse should often be about images and slogans are perfectly normal. When only empty images and slogans are on offer, I just have to hope that those offering them are secretly smarter than they sound.

  Among the more muddled ideas now in vogue about Thatcher is that “Thatcherism” led to the financial crisis. The suggestion reflects significant confusion about what Thatcher stood for and what she actually did.

  It is true that Thatcher promoted “deregulation,” and that “failure of regulation” appears to have been a significant factor in the financial collapse. But to say this is almost meaningless. The deregulation she promoted had nothing to do with the regulations or lack of regulations variously mooted as the trigger of the meltdown on Wall Street. It is simply untrue that she favored free markets with no regulation at all. Quite the contrary. She was a strong proponent, indeed a passionate proponent, of proper regulation—the kind of regulation that makes free markets function properly. She was emphatically not an anarchist—and she certainly did not advance the notion that the best state is one without rules or their enforcement.

  You will note that those who say “Thatcherite deregulation” is to blame never seem to point to a specific deregulatory failure connected to Thatcher. The laws and regulations she favored were generally good ones and remain good. Only someone who is really not thinking could blame shoddy subprime mortgages and complex credit derivatives on Thatcher: When she came to power, the financial instruments in question had not been invented.

  What kind of deregulation did Thatcher promote? She eliminated the foreign exchange controls that had been in place in Britain since the Second World War. She opened the stock market to foreign and domestic traders. This was the essence of “Thatcherite deregulation” in the financial sector. No one in his or her right mind is seriously suggesting, now, that these reforms were a mistake, and no one is seriously proposing to reverse them. No one ever points to a specific Thatcherite regulatory reform that can be connected to the current crisis, because there wasn’t one. “She promoted greed” is not an intellectually serious argument. Greed has been with us since the Garden of Eden.

  A key point, painfully overlooked: Thatcher was in fact a proponent of quite stringent bank regulation. The evidence for this is the 1986 Financial Services Act, which closed loopholes in the coverage of investor protection laws and established a more comprehensive regulatory structure to enhance enforcement powers. It applied the same investor protection standards to a broad range of securities and investment activities. I can say with confidence that the unregulated explosion of leverage in Western economies that followed her time in power was not what she stood for.

  The economic policies for which Thatcher is best known—and which for a time wrenched Britain from a trajectory of decline—have not been discredited by this crisis. Britain was essentially a socialist
state before Thatcher and the second-poorest country in Europe. She is known for denationalizing failing British industries; taking on and weakening Britain’s overweeningly powerful trade unions; curtailing government spending, advocating sound money, and promoting a business-friendly tax environment. She is also known for the skepticism she showed later in her time in power—now vindicated—about the project of European financial and political integration. Her reforms led to the longest sustained period of British economic expansion of the postwar era. Nothing in the recent crisis detracts from this or suggests that these reforms were misguided—or that their lessons are no longer relevant.

  And nothing, surely, detracts from her insight that the sovereign nation-state is the only entity that has thus far in history proved capable of acting effectively to secure its citizens’ interests. This point, as much as the arguments she made about free markets, needs deep consideration.

  Yet the past several years have compelled me, at least, to meditate upon Thatcher’s failures, as I submit they would to anyone more interested in reality than defending a thesis. The great unanswered question, to my mind, is whether she permanently succeeded in reversing Britain’s decline. I believed when I wrote this book that she had probably succeeded, but I am not as persuaded now—for obvious reasons. If she failed, that lesson too is relevant. The current recession in Britain has been the longest since the First World War. (The second-longest, not incidentally, lasted from 1979 to1983—and took place under Margaret Thatcher.) Britain’s underclass is as degraded as it ever was; it is feral, as they say, and there is no doubt that crime is rising steadily.