There is No Alternative

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

—ANNALS OF TACITUS, BOOK XIV

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.

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.