Read Online There is No Alternative by Claire Berlinski - Free Book Online

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.
    BI: You can imagine her, how devastated she was . . . Nothing had been prepared ! Now—
    CB: She was devastated?
    BI: Yeah.
    CB: What did she say?
    BI: Well, they’d never prepared anything!
    CB: Did she say, “I am devastated,” or are you inferring from something she—
    BI: No, no, I don’t remember her saying, “I’m devastated,” but I do remember her saying, “No preparations have been made, what on earth is going on ?” . . . When I say she was devastated, I think she was mortified , certainly—
    CB: Well, it really required years of preparation, how could she have been—
    BI: Two years, they’d had two years by then. But what does that tell you? It tells you that there was a palsy of will in the government machine . . . It was like a rabbit in the headlights! They knew trouble was there, but they thought they had to find a way of living with it, rather than beating it.
    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