Read There is No Alternative Online
Authors: Claire Berlinski
There is No Alternative (7 page)
CONFIDENTIAL
PAGE 01 LONDON 02415 01 OF 02 161633Z
O R 161602Z FEB 75
FM AM EMBASSY LONDON
TO USMISSION GENEVA IMMEDIATE
SUBJECT: MARGARET THATCHER: SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS
O R 161602Z FEB 75
FM AM EMBASSY LONDON
TO USMISSION GENEVA IMMEDIATE
SUBJECT: MARGARET THATCHER: SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS
. . . MARGARET THATCHER HAS BLAZED INTO NATIONAL PROMINENCE ALMOST LITERALLY FROM OUT OF NOWHERE. WHEN SHE FIRST INDICATED THAT SHE INTENDED TO STAND AGAINST TED HEATH FOR LEADERSHIP OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY, FEW TOOK HER CHALLENGE SERIOUSLY AND FEWER STILL BELIEVED IT WOULD SUCCEED. SHE HAD NEVER BEEN A MEMBER OF THE INNER CIRCLE OF TORY POWER BROKERS, AND NO POLITICIAN IN MODERN TIMES HAS COME TO THE LEADERSHIP OF EITHER MAJOR PARTY WITH SUCH A NARROW RANGE OF PRIOR EXPERIENCE. NOW SUDDENLY, AFTER WHAT HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS HER “DARINGLY SUCCESSFUL COMMANDO RAID ON THE HEIGHTS OF THE TORY PARTY,” SHE HAS BECOME THE FOCUS OF UNUSUALLY INTENSIVE MEDIA AND POPULAR INTEREST . . .
THERE IS GENERAL AGREEMENT AMONG FRIENDS AND CRITICS ALIKE THAT SHE IS AN EFFECTIVE AND FORCEFUL PARLIAMENTARY PERFORMER. SHE HAS A QUICK, IF NOT PROFOUND, MIND, AND WORKS HARD TO MASTER THE MOST COMPLICATED BRIEF. SHE FIGHTS HER CORNER WITH SKILL AND TOUGHNESS, BUT CAN BE FLEXIBLE WHEN PRESSED. IN DEALING WITH THE MEDIA OR WITH SUBORDINATES, SHE TENDS TO BE CRISP AND A TRIFLE PATRONIZING. WITH COLLEAGUES, SHE IS HONEST AND STRAIGHT-FORWARD, IF NOT EXCESSIVELY CONSIDERATE OF THEIR VANITIES.
CIVIL SERVANTS AT THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION FOUND HER AUTOCRATIC. SHE HAS THE COURAGE OF HER CONVICTIONS, AND ONCE SHE HAS REACHED A DECISION TO ACT, IS
UNLIKELY TO BE DEFLECTED BY ANY BUT THE MOST PERSUASIVE ARGUMENTS.
UNLIKELY TO BE DEFLECTED BY ANY BUT THE MOST PERSUASIVE ARGUMENTS.
SELF-CONFIDENT AND SELF-DISCIPLINED, SHE GIVES EVERY PROMISE OF BEING A STRONG LEADER . . .
EVEN BEFORE HER GREAT LEAP UPWARD, MRS. THATCHER HAD BEEN THE PERSONIFICATION OF A BRITISH MIDDLE CLASS DREAM COME TRUE. BORN THE DAUGHTER OF A GROCER, SHE HAD BY DINT OF HER OWN ABILITIES AND APPLICATION WON THROUGH, SECURING SCHOLARSHIPS TO GOOD SCHOOLS, MAKING A SUCCESS OF HER CHOSEN CAREER, AND MARRYING ADVANTAGEOUSLY. IT IS NOT SURPRISING THEN THAT SHE ESPOUSES THE MIDDLE CLASS VALUES OF THRIFT, HARD WORK, AND LAW AND ORDER, THAT SHE BELIEVES IN INDIVIDUAL CHOICE, MAXIMUM FREEDOM FOR MARKET FORCES, AND MINIMAL POWER FOR THE STATE. HERS IS THE GENUINE VOICE OF A BELEAGUERED BOURGEOISIE, ANXIOUS ABOUT ITS ERODING ECONOMIC POWER AND DETERMINED TO ARREST SOCIETY'S SEEMINGLY INEXORABLE TREND TOWARDS COLLECTIVISM. SOMEWHAT UNCHIVALROUSLY, DENIS HEALEY HAS DUBBED HER “LA PASIONARIA OF MIDDLE CLASS PRIVILEGE.”
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. . .
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. . .
UNFORTUNATELY FOR HER PROSPECTS OF BECOMING A NATIONAL, AS DISTINCT FROM A PARTY, LEADER, SHE HAS OVER THE YEARS ACQUIRED A DISTINCTIVELY UPPER MIDDLE CLASS PERSONAL IMAGE. HER IMMACULATE GROOMING, HER IMPERIOUS MANNER, HER CONVENTIONAL AND SOMEWHAT FORCED CHARM, AND ABOVE ALL HER PLUMMY VOICE STAMP HER AS THE QUINTESSENTIAL SUBURBAN MATRON, AND FRIGHTFULLY ENGLISH TO BOOT. NONE OF THIS GOES DOWN WELL WITH THE WORKING CLASS OF ENGLAND (ONE-THIRD OF WHICH USED TO VOTE CONSERVATIVE), TO SAY NOTHING OF ALL CLASSES IN THE CELTIC FRINGES OF THIS ISLAND . . .
Â
Margaret Thatcher's bustling, proper, middle-class officiousness prompted astonishing effusions of snobbery among Britain's elites. When asked why intellectuals loathed her so, the theater producer Jonathan Millar replied that it was “self-evident”âthey were nauseated by her “odious suburban gentility.” The philosopher Mary Warnock deplored Thatcher's “neat well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that's not exactly vulgar, just low,” embodying “the worst of the lower-middle-class.” This filled Warnock with “a kind of rage.”
(Courtesy of the family of Srdja Djukanovic)
(Courtesy of the family of Srdja Djukanovic)
THESE ARE STILL EARLY DAYS THOUGH . . . THE ODDS ARE AGAINST HER, BUT AFTER HER STUNNING ORGANIZATIONAL COUP D'ÃTAT THIS PAST MONTH, FEW ARE PREPARED TO SAY SHE CAN'T DO IT.
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Prime Minister Harold Wilson resigned in 1976, succeeded by the new leader of the Labour Party, James Callaghan. As leader of the Opposition, Thatcher immediately began to attract international notice, particularly for her coruscating attack on the Soviet Union, delivered at the Kensington Town Hall:
The Russians are bent on world dominance and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen . . . They put guns before butter while we put just about everything before guns. They know that they are a superpower in only one senseâthe military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms . . . If we cannot draw the lesson . . . then we are destined, in their words, to end up on the scrap heap of history.
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This speech led the state-controlled Soviet press to give her the name by which she has since been known: the Iron Lady. It tells you something about the way Britain was perceived at the time that the communist apparatchiks who coined this phrase presumably believed this would be understood in Britain as a hurtful insult, one that would damage her prestige, not enhance it. It also suggests how divorced those apparatchiks were from the sentiments of their own citizens, many of whom from then on worshipped her as primitive man worshipped the sun.
Like the rest of the industrialized world, Britain endured throughout the 1970s the reverberating effects of the 1973 oil price shock. Inflation soared, reaching a peak of 27 percent in 1975. If real wages were diminishing, Britain's labor leaders concluded, this was more than a hardship for the working man, it was an injustice perpetrated against him by the ruling classes. The remedy, they concluded, was workers' solidarity and the blunt weapon of industrial action. Labor leaders of greater wisdom, or at least ones in possession of a more sophisticated economic model, might have concluded that strikes and work stoppages were the last thing Britain now needed, and indeed the one thing guaranteed to deal a death blow to an already faltering economy. Wisdom was not their forte.
During the Winter of Discontent, the question raised by Heathâ
Who rules?
âhung over Britain like a cold cloud. That question was understood to be
the
question, and it was a question to which Britain's powerful unions had a ready answer:
We do.
They had, after all, with contemptuous ease brought down the Heath government. The labor barons were persuaded that although they would never lead Britain, it was within their power to run it, and they proposed to run it for their benefit, embedding in both law and custom practices that everyone beyond the union halls could see would in the end destroy Britain as a competitive economic power.
Who rules?
âhung over Britain like a cold cloud. That question was understood to be
the
question, and it was a question to which Britain's powerful unions had a ready answer:
We do.
They had, after all, with contemptuous ease brought down the Heath government. The labor barons were persuaded that although they would never lead Britain, it was within their power to run it, and they proposed to run it for their benefit, embedding in both law and custom practices that everyone beyond the union halls could see would in the end destroy Britain as a competitive economic power.
When the 1979 general election brought the Conservatives back to power, there was no widespread expectation that Thatcher could change this situation, and there has been no attempt retrospectively to suggest that there was. Her election, according to her friends and enemies alike, was not personal: It was a rebuke to the Labour Party and the embarrassing diminishment of Britain over which it had presided.
BI:
She won by a contempt, really, for the Labour Party's inability to cope with the trade unions. But no great expectation that she would be any better at it. They felt she ought to have a chance. I think quite a lot of people thought that she couldn't do any
worse
than the men . . .
She won by a contempt, really, for the Labour Party's inability to cope with the trade unions. But no great expectation that she would be any better at it. They felt she ought to have a chance. I think quite a lot of people thought that she couldn't do any
worse
than the men . . .
CB:
How would you describe the economic climate, the moral climate in Britain back then?
How would you describe the economic climate, the moral climate in Britain back then?
BI:
Let me try to make the point this way. Just as I believe people in this country, the most
stupid
people in our country, most of whom can be found in our government, do not understand the nature of the trauma that hit the United States with 9/11, so the United Statesâand people in this country have forgottenâso people in the United States will have no understanding, really, of the dire nature that British society had reached by 1979. It wasn't quite so bad that people felt that society was breaking down, but it was bad
enough for people to wonder whether they would go into work that day, whether they would get into work that day, whether their rubbish would be cleared, where the next strikeârailway or whateverâwould happen. And it was a poor society. I've never been as poor in my adult life as I was in the mid '70s. Devaluation [of the currency] and all that kind of thing. I felt, even though I was a civil servant, I felt impoverished. Because of the shabbiness. The way Britain had become, it felt totally shabby. In the hands of a many-headed dictator calledâ
Let me try to make the point this way. Just as I believe people in this country, the most
stupid
people in our country, most of whom can be found in our government, do not understand the nature of the trauma that hit the United States with 9/11, so the United Statesâand people in this country have forgottenâso people in the United States will have no understanding, really, of the dire nature that British society had reached by 1979. It wasn't quite so bad that people felt that society was breaking down, but it was bad
enough for people to wonder whether they would go into work that day, whether they would get into work that day, whether their rubbish would be cleared, where the next strikeârailway or whateverâwould happen. And it was a poor society. I've never been as poor in my adult life as I was in the mid '70s. Devaluation [of the currency] and all that kind of thing. I felt, even though I was a civil servant, I felt impoverished. Because of the shabbiness. The way Britain had become, it felt totally shabby. In the hands of a many-headed dictator calledâ
CB:
What did “shabby” look like?
What did “shabby” look like?
BI:
It was a fairly primitive society. People living in council houses, under the thumb of local authorities, large areas of working-class houses that had long since seen their best . . . It was shabby.
It was a fairly primitive society. People living in council houses, under the thumb of local authorities, large areas of working-class houses that had long since seen their best . . . It was shabby.
Britain
was
shabby, I can testify to this. In fact, I moved to Britain in 1988, at the tail end of the Thatcher era, and it was still shabby. Before this, I had been working in Paris as a
fille au pair.
The difference between Paris and Londonâeven after nearly ten years of Thatcherâwas shocking. Paris was gay, bright, renovated; London was dreary and sullen. Throughout Britain, people looked ragged and worn-down. The food was inedible. Standards of customer service were appalling. Nearly twenty years later, the transformation of Britain is undeniable. London is now pristine and gleaming, packed with superb restaurants, purveyors of flat-screen televisions and organic linens, upscale aromatherapists. There has been a transformation in the appearance of the British people: They look healthier; they have better skin and glossier hair; they are well-dressed. To take the Eurostar from London to Paris is now to have precisely the opposite reaction from the one I had two decades ago. Getting off the train, one notes immediately that by comparison with London, Paris is shabby.
was
shabby, I can testify to this. In fact, I moved to Britain in 1988, at the tail end of the Thatcher era, and it was still shabby. Before this, I had been working in Paris as a
fille au pair.
The difference between Paris and Londonâeven after nearly ten years of Thatcherâwas shocking. Paris was gay, bright, renovated; London was dreary and sullen. Throughout Britain, people looked ragged and worn-down. The food was inedible. Standards of customer service were appalling. Nearly twenty years later, the transformation of Britain is undeniable. London is now pristine and gleaming, packed with superb restaurants, purveyors of flat-screen televisions and organic linens, upscale aromatherapists. There has been a transformation in the appearance of the British people: They look healthier; they have better skin and glossier hair; they are well-dressed. To take the Eurostar from London to Paris is now to have precisely the opposite reaction from the one I had two decades ago. Getting off the train, one notes immediately that by comparison with London, Paris is shabby.
Prior to the 1979 election, the British ambassador to Paris, Nicholas Henderson, sent a dispatch to the Foreign Office. It was
leaked several weeks later to the press during the general election campaign and immediately became an iconic document, a detailed and devastating dissection of British shabbiness and all that it entailed.
leaked several weeks later to the press during the general election campaign and immediately became an iconic document, a detailed and devastating dissection of British shabbiness and all that it entailed.
“I myself,” he wrote,
was able to observe Churchill, Attlee and Bevin dealing on equal terms with Stalin and Truman at the Potsdam Conference when no German or Frenchman was present . . . in the mid '50s we were still the strongest European power, economically and militarily . . . It is our decline since then in relation to our European partners that has been so marked, so that today we are not only no longer a world power, we are not even in the first rank as a European one . . .
Indeed in France we have come nowadays to be associated with malaise as closely as in the old days we were associated with success.
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Contemporary readers of this document will be struck by another remark. “Apologists,” wrote Henderson, “. . . will argue that the British way of life, with ingenuity and application devoted to leisure rather than work, is superior to that elsewhere and in any case what people want.” If that argument sounds familiar, it should: It is what is now said about France.
There is a point that should be emphasized here. In terms of key economic indicators, Britain was not declining in absolute terms; in fact, the economy had grown at a slow but steady average of 2 to 3 percent per annum since the end of the Second World War. What Ingham and Henderson are lamenting is Britain's relative decline. Once the world's foremost power, it had now been outpaced by Germany.
And why? This is a key question. One hypothesis is that the economic policies Britain pursued after the Second World War destroyed Britain's natural genius for greatness. A second is that Britain simply followed a natural economic pattern: It experienced rapid growth at the onset of industrialization, but slower growth thereafter. If Germany was, in the 1970s, growing faster than Britain, this was because Germany had begun the process of industrialization later than Britain. More to the point, having been leveled in the Second World War, Germany was starting from zero, which severely skews any statistical analysis.
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