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

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.
    BI: The British establishment was in the grip of a sort of pale-pink socialism. There are still a lot of them around now who believe, who have this sort of naive, this romantic view of the working classes—from which I come! I mean, I said, to Eric Morley, “What’s he like, Tony Benn?” “Oh!” he said. “The only thing you need to know about Wedgie is that he thinks the sun shines out of the working classes—!” And then he said to me, “And you and I know better , don’t we?” It’s this romantic notion of—I mean, it’s horridly condescending.
    Anthony “Tony” Neil Wedgwood “Wedgie” Benn, a prominent figure on the Left wing of the Labour Party—the man whose proposals Keith Joseph savaged in his Upminster speech—was the grandson of First Baronet Sir John Benn and the son of the secretary of state for India, First Viscount Stansgate. Benn was educated at one of Britain’s top-flight public schools. Ingham grew up in the West Yorkshire Pennines. His father was a cotton-weaver. Although
many of Thatcher’s intimates came from the traditional British ruling class, a notable number did not. Some had not even graduated from university. Many came, like Ingham did, from a working-class background, or, like Thatcher herself, from a lower-middle-class background. A surprising number were Jewish, among them Keith Joseph. It was a government, in many respects, of outsiders, and this must be understood to appreciate both its revolutionary character and the hostility it inspired.
    CB: Where does this romantic notion come from? What are the origins of that?
    BI: Oh, I would have thought the origins are in the Fabians, you know, that we must do good . We know how to do good , and we have the money to do good , and we have the security and we will do good. And that inevitably became, and you will be done good to !
    The thought of the Fabians and their quest to do good makes Ingham bulgy-eyed and red-faced; he punctuates this comment with table-pounding, then lapses, winded, into phlegmy coughing, prompting in me the slight concern that he is about to suffer a fit of apoplexy and keel over. The Fabian Society was the precursor to the Labour Party. Founded in 1884 to advance socialism by reform, rather than revolution, it took its name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Cunctator, who proposed to exhaust the Carthaginians through a strategy of harassment and attrition. None of the Fabians’ founding members came from a working-class background, and most came from money and privilege.
    I have remarked that being a woman in a man’s world was not necessarily the disadvantage it is often imagined to be. Nor was being a grocer’s daughter in a world of guilty aristocrats. In the way only a Republican could go to China, Thatcher was able to pursue an anti-socialist agenda precisely because her class background lent her an ideological imprimatur. She and Ingham found each
other so sympathetic in part because they shared a thorough revulsion with the condescension of people who wanted to do good to them and people like them, when they felt themselves quite good enough as