There is No Alternative

by Claire Berlinski

  56 TV Interview with David Frost for TV-AM, June 7, 1985, London. Transcript from Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 105826.

  57 Wyatt was a Labour MP and journalist who became an admirer of Thatcher.

  58 Mayo Clinic Staff, December 19, 2005, Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research (MFMER), www.edition.cnn.com/HEALTH/library/DS/00652.html.

  59 John T. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link between a Little Craziness and a Lot of Success in America (Simon & Schuster, 2005).

  60 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 557. She is talking about the conference center, by the way, not the cruise ship.

  61 He is now Lord Kinnock, but the man is, after all, a socialist (a “crypto-communist,” even, if you take Thatcher’s word for it), so the title seems a bit ridiculous. In fact, I finally just asked him, “What would you like me to call you?” He said, “Neil.”

  62 June 4, 1985, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [80/149–54].

  63 July 11, 1985, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [82/1256–60].

  64 January 16, 1986, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [89/1203–08].

  65 November 12, 1985, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [86/422–28].

  66 January 22, 1985, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [71/855–60].

  67 June 13, 1985, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [80/1007–12].

  68 Ibid.

  69 November 15, 1984, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [67/791–96].

  70 June 13, 1985, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [80/1007–12].

  71 January 17, 1985, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [71/506–10].

  72 May 21, 1985, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [79/851–56].

  73 April 30, 1985, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [78/133–38].

  74 February 12, 1985, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [73/161–66].

  75 I’ve heard variants on this story from a number of Thatcher intimates. One of her civil servants remembered desperately trying to finesse a compromise between Thatcher and her chancellor during a dispute over the budget. His delicate diplomacy was upended when Thatcher came back from the Commons, apparently quite drunk, and discovered her chancellor holding a secret strategy meeting behind closed doors. She strode in uninvited, kicked off her shoes, tucked her heels under herself, and declared, “Well, gentlemen, let’s just settle this now, shall we?” She “held court like a Queen Bee,” and what do you know, they settled it. Afterward, the other civil servants could be heard muttering among themselves, “Phwooarh, wasn’t she sexy tonight?” Mitterrand, according to the same civil servant, was “visibly moved” in Thatcher’s presence.

  76 Alan Clark, Diaries: Into Politics 1972–1982 (Phoenix, 2000), p. 147.

  77 George Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys (Harcourt Brace, 1953).

  78 Clark, Diaries: In Power, p. 35.

  79 It may be seen on the PBS series Commanding Heights: www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/video/qt/mini_p02_09_300.html .

  80 For a more complete discussion of Jaruzelski’s gambit, see John O’Sullivan, The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World (Regnery, 2006), pp. 294–299.

  81 Transcript from Commanding Heights, Chapter 9, Poland’s Solidarity: www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/tr_show02.html#9.

  82 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 380.

  83 Ibid., p. 381.

  84 Speech to Conservative Party Conference, October 12, 1984, Brighton, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 105763.

  85 Speech to her constituency at Finchley, October 20, 1984, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 105769.

  86 She told this version of the joke while giving a speech in Bermuda on August 7, 2001, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 109301. It pops up elsewhere; it seems to have been a staple of her repertoire.

  87 Frank Hahn, “On Market Economies,” in Thatcherism, ed. Robert Skidelsky (Chatto & Windus, 1988).

  88 Speech in Korea, “The Principles of Thatcherism,” September 3, 1992, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 108302.

  89 When I spoke to Lawson about the definition of Thatcherism, he noted pointedly that Thatcher “was very much the captain of her team,” but her policies “were made by a team, and not just by her alone.” Of course they were. When I speak of Thatcherite reforms, I am using a shorthand for the reforms made by Thatcher and her team. Thatcher was the prime minister, however, so I think it fair to call the reforms that took place while she was in power “Thatcherite reforms.”

  90 Samuel Smiles was the Victorian author of Self-Help, as well as the similar page-turners Character, Thrift, and Duty.

  91 Lawson, The View from No. 11, p. 64.

  92 For an excellent discussion of this point, see Shirley Robin Letwin’s The Anatomy of Thatcherism (Transaction Publishers, 1992).

  93 Speech to Zurich Economic Society, “The New Renaissance,” March 14, 1977, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 103336.

  94 Iain Macleod Memorial Lecture, “Dimensions of Conservatism,” July 4, 1977, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 103411.

  95 Economists will quibble with my rephrasing. They will note that the First Theorem of Welfare Economics predicts only that given certain initial conditions, viz, that (1) there are markets for all the goods and services that people want to trade and (2) that economic agents act as price takers, a free market will generate a Pareto-efficient outcome. The theorem does not specifically predict that fewer people will starve to death. I added that part. I added it because it’s true, and we wouldn’t give a damn about Pareto-efficiency if it weren’t.

  96 Again, this is not a far-fetched example. This is taking place right now. Food prices are rising precipitously, and governments around the globe are responding with price caps.

  97 “Heresy in the USSR,” Commanding Heights, PBS, April 23, 2004.

  98 Beyond this, the economist Georgios Karras has suggested, the drag on productivity begins to outweigh the benefits. See “The Optimal Government Size: Further International Evidence on the Productivity of Government Services,” Economic Inquiry 34 (April 1996). In developing, rather than developed, countries, the optimal size is larger. When governments cost more than this surprisingly small percentage of a nation’s gross domestic product, you do not tend to see commensurate improvements in critical social indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality, or school enrollment. See, e.g., E. A. Peden, “Productivity in the United States and Its Relationship to Government Activity: An Analysis of 57 Years, 1929–1986,” Public Choice 69 (February 1991). This research was done after Thatcher’s rise to power, of course, but would have come as no surprise to her.

  99 It is often said that inflation accelerates under these circumstances, but this is technically wrong. Acceleration refers to the rate of change. The inflation rate is the rate of change in prices. What is accelerating here is the rise in prices, not inflation. To say that inflation “accelerates” would better convey the drama of the problem, however, as in, This inflation is like a truck with failed brakes careening down a steep hill.

  100 Again, the term, strictly speaking, should be non-increasing inflation rate of unemployment—but for some reason that’s not what economists call it.

  101 Thatcher’s predecessor, Jim Callaghan, also tried to control inflation through monetary policy. It is incorrect to imply, as some do, that Thatcher’s was the first British government to try this. But Callaghan didn’t last long enough in office to be widely remembered for it.

  102 Speech to Conservative Party Conference, October 10, 1980, Brighton, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 104431.

  103 Speech at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., February 27, 1981, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 104580.

  104 Lawson, The View from No. 11, p. 137.

  105 Various news reports from Channel 4. These were, not at all incidentally, race riots, very similar to the ones now common in France.

  106 In fact, it grew 19.5 percen
t.

  107 Lawson, e-mail correspondence, September 27, 2007.

  108 I am greatly indebted to the economist Martin Davies for helping me to disentangle these policies and their consequences.

  109 Before Thatcher, the state-owned Post Office provided all of Britain’s telephone, telecom, and postal services.

  110 Per capita income of course is not the only measure of a nation’s economic health; it certainly proves nothing about a nation’s long-term economic prospects—if it did, Germany would still be at the top of the table. Moreover, it is not entirely reasonable to compare British performance with Germany’s, given that during this period West and East Germany were reunited. Even with these reservations, these are impressive statistics.

  111 See, e.g., Stephen Nickell and Glenda Qintini, “The Recent Performance of the UK Labour Market,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 18, no. 2 (2002). By their estimates, the NAIRU was roughly 9.5 percent during the 1980s. From 1991 to 1997 it fell to 8.9 percent, and thereafter to 5.7 percent. In “Falling Unemployment: The Dutch and British Cases,” Economic Policy (April 2000), Nickell and Jan Van Ours argue that the weakening of the unions was the most important reason for the decline of NAIRU, followed by changes to the tax structure and changes in benefits policy.

  112 Speech to the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies, “Let Our Children Grow Tall,” September 15, 1975, BBC transcript, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 102769.

  113 See, e.g., Urban Bäckström, “The Swedish Economy,” Svenska Handelsbanken’s Seminar, New York, October 7, 1998, and “Swedish Economic History: Structural Problems and Reforms,” Ekonomifakta (2008).

  114 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, pp. 173–174.

  115 Ibid., p. 179.

  116 Ibid., p. 178.

  117 Ibid., p. 179.

  118 Ibid., p. 179.

  119 John Smith, 74 Days: An Islander’s Diary of the Falklands Occupation (Century, 1984).

  120 You may listen to this speech here: www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/displaydocument.asp?docid=110946 .

  121 Ali Magoudi, Rendez-vous: The Psychoanalysis of Francois Mitterrand, translated and reported in “The Sphinx and the Curious Case of the Iron Lady’s H-bomb,” (London) Times, November 20, 2005.

  122 TV interview for ITN, April 5, 1982, transcript, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 104913.

  123 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 181.

  124 April 8, 1982, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [21/1083–88].

  125 James Rentschler’s Falklands Diary, April 8, 1982, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/arcdocs/RentschlerPDF.pdf.

  126 Ibid.

  127 Ibid.

  128 Ibid., April 11.

  129 Ibid., April 12.

  130 “Falklands Victory ‘A Close Run Thing,’” Guardian, April 3, 2002.

  131 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 204.

  132 www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGxsLbK9F0A.

  133 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 214.

  134 Speech to the Scottish Conservative Party Conference, May 14, 1982, transcript, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 104936.

  135 “Reagan Asked Thatcher to Stop Falklands War,” Sunday Times, March 8, 1992, citing National Security Council files.

  136 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 184.

  137 June 17, 1982, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [25/1080–84].

  138 Speech to UN General Assembly, June 23, 1982, Thatcher MSS (digital collection), doc. 104974.

  139 Bernard Jackson with Tony Wardle, The Battle for Orgreave (Vanson Wardle, 1986).

  140 June 19, 1984, House of Commons PQs, Hansard HC [62/137–40].

  141 Linda Sheridan, e-mail, May 14, 2007.

  142 www.socialist-labour-party.org.uk/.

  143 Sheridan, e-mail, May 15, 2007.

  144 The reader who is wondering why I bothered should know that this has worked for me before. You would be surprised how many people will give in and talk to you if only you pester them enough.

  145 The publishing titan Rupert Murdoch was so close to Thatcher that he was described by critics as “the phantom Prime Minister.”

  146 Morning Star, February 3, 1983.

  147 Sunday Times, January 10, 1982.

  148 The New Left Review, July/August 1975.

  149 One may reasonably argue—and Trotsky did—that in this sense Stalin was not a Marxist: The central prediction of Marxism is the inevitability of a spontaneous revolution in the industrialized world, led by the proletarian vanguard. This discussion is beyond the scope of this book; my point is that an important, relevant current of sympathy runs between Stalin’s views and Scargill’s.

  150 Marxism Today, April 1981.

  151 LALKLAR, “Celebrating the October Revolution,” January/February 2000.

  152 Seamus Milne, a journalist for the Guardian, argues that most of this money never reached the miners. The payment was authorized, he acknowledges, and sent to a Swiss bank, but the Kremlin developed cold feet when British courts ordered the union’s assets sequestered and had the money recalled. See Seamus Milne, The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners (Verso, 1994). After the fall of the Berlin Wall, well-placed Soviet officials confirmed claims that the Soviet Union had indeed funneled large amounts of cash to the union. Milne says those officials are lying and attributes their mendacity to post-communist factional infighting within the Kremlin. Milne may be right, for all I know. The essential point—which Milne ignores—is not whether the money in fact arrived, or when it arrived, or by which channel. It is that Scargill did not hesitate to appeal to Moscow for help, and Moscow was eager to give it, although understandably reluctant to risk the loss of hard currency and the diplomatic embarrassment should the transfer become public.

  153 Telegraph, April 13, 1981.

  154 New Left Review, July/August 1975.

  155 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 339.

  156 Morning Star, June 27, 1983.

  157 From the annals of the Marxist wit and wisdom of Arthur Scargill: “In an attempt to prevent the movement of coal, Scargill appealed to the Communist General Secretary of the South Wales miners, Dai Francis, to send thousands of pickets to the Saltley coke works in Birmingham: ‘Yes, we can organize them,’ Francis told Scargill. ‘When do you want them?’ ‘Tomorrow, Saturday,’ Scargill answered. Dai paused: ‘But Wales are playing Scotland at Cardiff Arms Park.’ There was a silence before Scargill replied: ‘But Dai, the working class are playing the ruling class at Saltley.’” Patrick Hannan, When Arthur Met Maggie (Seren, 2006).

  158 Pitmatic is the now-dying dialect of northeastern coal miners, e.g., “Te these canny lads we’d like to give a wee bit o’ advice: Watch yersels, an’ dee what’s reet an’ divvent be pit mice. We waddent like te see any o’ yer ivver cum te grief. There’s ne carl at arl te smash yersels or Rarfie’s perminent Relief.” You can listen to a sample, as well as an interesting discussion of the dialect, here: www.bbc.co.uk/radi04/routesofenglish/storysofar/ramfiles/roe1_ray1.ram.

  159 She is referring to Milne’s The Enemy Within. Milne argues that Thatcher and her government went to extraordinary lengths to smear and discredit Scargill. I agree. Milne thinks this was a bad thing.

  160 Sheridan, e-mail, July 14, 2007. I have standardized her punctuation.

  161 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). The full text is now available online: www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/index.html.

  162 Thatcher’s proposal to introduce a flat-rate poll tax was widely pilloried; indeed, it contributed significantly to her downfall. But the only difference between the poll tax and the coal tax was that one was out in the open, the other was hidden. Both were forms of taxation that targeted the rich and the poor equally. The unofficial coal tax cost the average Briton far more than the proposed poll tax.

  163 Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier.

  164 This is only to say that the mines were now v
ery dangerous, rather than unspeakably dangerous. Coal mining in the nineteenth century was an unmitigated horror. To better understand the militant culture of the miners’ union, consider the Risca Blackvein Colliery explosion of 1860, which claimed the lives of 146 men and boys. A random sample of names from the Death Roll: “Brimble, Thomas, Aged 12, After Damp. Brimble, William, Aged 13, Burnt . . . Pearce, George, Aged 13, Burnt . . . Saunders, Llew, Came Out Alive, but died later . . . Skidmore, George, Aged 35, After Damp . . . Thomas, Llewellyn, Aged 15, Burnt.” It goes on for pages in this vein. The local newspaper reported only the “severe financial loss suffered by the mine owner, with the death of 28 pit ponies at an estimated value of £1,000” (www.welshcoalmines.co.uk/). Only thirty miners were killed in Britain in the year before the strike: This is what was meant by “an improvement.” If the cruelty of the mining industry is not enough to sour you on it, the environmental costs should do it. Anyone who believes that global climate change is a manmade phenomenon must of necessity accept that coal is a large part of the problem. Burning coal produces greenhouse gases in such quantities that the Environmental Protection Agency has declared coal-burning power plants to be the single worst air polluters in America. EPA studies suggest that coal emissions kill some 30,000 Americans a year, causing nearly as many deaths as traffic accidents. See Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (Perseus, 2003). Clean-coal technology has been developed, but it raises the price of producing coal considerably. Bring on the nuclear power, I say.