There is No Alternative (8 page)

I mention this argument to Sir Bernard, who agrees that yes, Britain's decline was only a relative decline. But his reply—and again, this may be taken as the official Thatcherite view—was that even this relative decline needn't have occurred.

We won the bloody war.
To understand Thatcherism, start with this sentiment. We won the bloody war, and we used to run the world. Now we have rubbish and dead bodies piled on our streets, and compared to German cities, gleaming and rebuilt with Marshall Aid (never mind that the trees in those cities are exactly the same height, one of the most chilling sights in the world, when you consider what it means), we look
shabby.

This sense of humiliation was Thatcher's fuel.

At the age of fifty-three, Margaret Thatcher became the first female prime minister in the history of Britain. At the age of fifty-four, she became the most unpopular prime minister in the history of Britain. By no standards could her first years in office be termed a success. Zealously embracing the monetarist prescription, her government attempted to control inflation by raising interest rates. To her dismay, inflation rose, and unemployment quickly doubled.

In 1980, at the Conservative Party conference, Thatcher made one of her most famous speeches. This would not be Heath redux. “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase—the U-turn, I have only one thing to say.
You
turn if you want to
—”

Dramatic pause.

“
The Lady's not for turning!
”
²³

A punch line perfectly executed. A roaring crowd. The words came from the title of Christopher Fry's play
The Lady's Not for Burning,
and even those who did not understand the reference understood the drama.

Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Britain was now in a severe recession, with unemployment at its highest rate since the Second World War. According to Keynesian orthodoxy, the government should have been stimulating demand, even if this created inflation. Instead, it continued to attempt to curb inflation by controlling the money supply. Thatcher's chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, unveiled another counter-Keynesian budget, raising taxes. Keynesian economists throughout Britain were aghast; 364 of them sent an open letter to the
Times
arguing that this policy would “deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability.” Thatcher ignored them. She purged her cabinet of those who agreed with them. In this respect, she had not been kidding; there was no turning.

But on the other critical battlefront, she turned straightaway. Faced with the threat of a miners' strike and unprepared for it, she capitulated immediately to the National Union of Mineworkers.

Ingham is arguing—as he would—that the failure to prepare for this absolutely predictable challenge wasn't Thatcher's fault. It was the fault of the “government machine.” But Thatcher was the head of the government, so this is an impossible distinction to sustain. The failure to prepare was Thatcher's failure and was widely understood to be so.

Thus the achievements of the first years of Thatcherism: Her economic policy was ostensibly a disaster, and far from taming the unions, she had proved herself, as the union leaders claimed, a bitch, to be sure, but
their
bitch. Had her time in power ended
here, she would have been noted by history as a footnote and a minor curiosity.

By 1982, unemployment had reached 3.6 million—a conservative estimate, in both senses of the word, since the government kept finding new ways to define unemployment to make this statistic come out lower. Heath had caved in and reversed his policies when unemployment reached
one
million. Inflation was beginning slowly to drop, but British manufacturing had shrunk by a quarter. Rioters took to the streets; British cities burned. No one believed Thatcher would survive, and indeed she might not have survived, had she not been blessed by extraordinary luck—as so often she was.

That luck came in two forms: the utter disarray of the Labour Party, riven by factional infighting, and the fecklessness of the leader of the Argentine military junta, Leopoldo Galtieri, who chose this moment to seize the Falkland Islands. Thatcher dispatched a naval task force to recapture them, winning a spectacular military victory. The Labour Party fragmented, its members at each other's throats. Thatcher won the 1983 general election in a landslide.

It was now that the Thatcher revolution really began. Britain's economy began not only to recover but to grow. The Tories introduced legislation to curb the power of trade unions and stockpiled coal, preparing to withstand a miners' strike. The government began selling off nationalized industries and public utilities at a brisk clip, and continued selling state-owned council houses to their tenants, an enormously popular policy.
²⁴
With Thatcher's support, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative and stationed cruise missiles on British soil.

In 1984 came the defining moment of Thatcher's tenure: the battle for the coal mines. The story of the miners' strike is so gripping it might be fiction, but it is entirely true. It involves two great personalities: Thatcher herself, and Arthur Scargill, coal miner and communist, one of the most powerful orators in the annals of the Left. It is a story of two ways of looking at the world, and the contest that would determine whether Britain would be a capitalist society or a socialist one.

Previous mining strikes had been over in a matter of weeks. Not this one. Over the course of a year, as all of Britain watched, horrified, waiting to see who would break first, Thatcher proceeded to crush her enemies with a calculating, ruthless violence that stunned the British public. Neither labor nor the unions ever recovered. For a brief moment of clarity, power politics stood revealed in all its stark drama. The unions had made a bid for power. They lost. They were doomed. No longer was there any doubt what kind of country Britain would be. No longer was there any doubt who ruled.

In late 1984, Mikhail Gorbachev visited Britain. Thatcher declared him a man she could do business with. One year later, the West did business with him at the Reykjavik summit, and the year following, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. In 1987, Thatcher won a third term in office, becoming the only prime minister in the twentieth century to serve three consecutive terms.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Just as communism's prehensile grip on power began to loosen, so did Thatcher's. The introduction of the poll tax—a uniform, fixed charge for community services—was intended to reduce the hold of the Labour Party on local councils by exposing its profligacy, but instead sparked protests and riots. Inflation began again to rise. Her cabinet fractured over the terms of Britain's entry into Europe.

In 1990, her longest-serving minister, Geoffrey Howe, resigned. Thatcher was challenged for the Conservative Party leadership by
her former defense minister, Michael Heseltine, who gained sufficient votes in the first round of balloting to force a second one. Persuaded by her cabinet colleagues that she had lost the support of her party and could not win, she resigned.

She was never defeated at the polls.

Leave aside for the moment the question of credit for the vibrant state of Britain's economy now—is it the consequence of Thatcher's policies, or New Labour's, or both, or neither? We will come back to that. Let us instead ask what seems to me the obvious question to ask of the man who managed Thatcher's image. Given that the economy
is
now so vibrant, why is Thatcher still so often reviled in Britain? For if it is often said that the American people would elect her in a heartbeat, this is not so in the country she ran. Thatcher's name to this day inspires in a remarkable number of her countrymen profound vitriol, even among people who have clearly been the beneficiaries of her policies. What was it about her that so rubbed people the wrong way?

Needless to say, Ingham does not believe the animus to be fair.

In one sense, Ingham has a point. Awkwardly for the signatories, immediately after the publication of their letter, Britain's economy entered an uninterrupted eight-year period of growth. Yet it is also true that the industrial base of the economy was not only eroded, as they had predicted, but gutted. The growth rate reflected the expansion of the services sector; the manufacturing sector contracted sharply in those early years and never recovered. The prediction that her policies would threaten social stability was borne out: Britain was taken to the brink of civil war during the miners' strike. I note what Ingham said not because it is the unalloyed truth, but because it nonetheless contains an important insight about the nature of Thatcherism and the grievances of her critics.