Book Report: There Is No Alternative
So about a month ago I hit up Borders’s Going out Of Business Sale (rest in peace all four of my area Borders-es). Picked up some pretty good books. Got a collection of papers by Uncle Miltie, Nicole Galinas’s After The Fall (which I’m reading right now and am so far a bit disappointed with), as well as several other neat little books that I have no time to read, much less blog about. One book I did manage to read and am now going to blog about is Claire Berlinski’s political biography of Margaret Thatcher.
I actually corresponded with Ms. Berlinski a few months ago after seeing her give an interview on Uncommon Knowledge and really enjoyed the interview. So I finally got around to buying her book which was very enjoyable.
Rather than writing an encyclopedia entry Berlinski instead poses the question “Why does Margaret Thatcher matter?” How did she accomplish what she accomplished. And what exactly did she accomplish anyway? Thatcher is or course an enormous figure in the political history of the late 20th Century. Perhaps not on the level of Winston Churchill, but in many ways even Churchill did not have the clout and force of personality that Thatcher could at times evoke.
With plenty of interview transcripts, snappy prose, and the sort of amusing little asides you would expect from a woman who made her name as a blogger, Berlinski paints a picture of an amazingly forceful woman. Berlinski devotes a great deal of time to analyzing Thatcher’s personality and how she affected both her friends and enemies. Yet after reading the book Thatcher seems even more of an enigma to me. Thatcher was a lady of the old school, motivated by a deeply ingrained strict moral code. Thatcher’s war against socialism was nearly religious in it’s urgency. And yet she was always quick to exploit the advantages of being a woman in a male dominated world of politics. She stood apart not just from other women who she often times treated with disrespect, bordering on contempt, but also away from her male colleagues who could never quite feel entirely comfortable with her. Of all her contemporaries it seems only Ronald Reagan really understood her perfectly.
But this book isn’t a mere personality study; it delves relatively substantially in to the policies and issues of the Thatcher years. I read the chapter dealing with the infamous year long coal miners’ strike at the height of the Wisconsin protests and was struck at just how relevant it was. Sometimes I get the feeling I’ve stepped back in time to the early 1980s. Thatcher would be at home. She took over the reigns of government in 1979 after years of disastrous leftist rule by both Labour and Conservatives. In 1979 the UK was a wreck. Britain was a dingy, filthy, bankrupt, gray, hopeless little island who’s glory days were well behind her. The British economy was in shambles. Labour strikes and power outages were daily affairs. Everywhere there was just sort of long spiralling deterioration in quality. Quality of goods. Quality of services. Quality of living. Berlinski mentions an anecdote about the Russian Trade Representative refusing to buy British goods on account of their shabbiness and compares the dilapidated grimy London with the clean, new, shinning Paris of 1979 )(ironic that thirty years later London would be a world capital and Paris would look like a slum).All the experts could talk about was a “managed decline”. Thatcher almost alone, raged against going quietly into that good night.
Thatcher went to work on an aggressive set of proposals meant to eliminate inflation and spur investment, guided by the work of Milton Freidman. Yet her economic team was relatively inexperienced. Initially her policies proved disasterous, because of various technical reasons. It was as if her team was making a soup but couldn’t quite get the porportions of all the ingredients right. The fact that she stuck to her policies, confident in the rightness of them dispite the setbacks and enormous pressure to altter course was herculean.
Probably the biggest domestic crisis of her Premiership was the coal miner’s strike. Ostensibly a dispute over some mine closures (at the time the UK Coal industry was nationalized) but really more about the Stalinist head of the Mine Workers Union Arthur Scargill and his hatred of Thatcher. After a year of intense violence and protest the strike was broken and the NUM virtually destroyed, and with it the entire British coal industry. Dozens of small mining towns never recovered and Berlinski goes to lengths to demonstrate that not all of the UK benefited from Thatcher’s economic revolution. Though I myself tend to put the blame for the cruel fate of the coal miners squarely on the shoulders of their union and the succeeding governments who propped up a dying industry, making a precipitous fall, rather than a gentle decline ll but inevitable.
Today our country faces a series of inter-related challenges. We have a looming debt crisis, a stagnant economy, high unemployment, creeping inflation, labour troubles, and a political class that is abjectly spineless and incapable of solving any problems. While certainly our position is not nearly as bad as the UK’s in 1979 it certainly is not good. If we want to right this ship of state we might look to the example of Thatcher, both in how her policies changed the face of Britain from a rust belt industrial shell to a modern, prosperous economy, but also what kind of a politician she was, how she projected strength and confidence and sincerity (I doubt think even her worst opponents would doubt that she was anything but sincere in her rhetoric and her policies). Is there anyone on these shores who can fill her shoes?
