Book review: Thatcher's Britain, by Richard Vinen

THE PAST YEAR HAS SEEN A MINI-spate of Thatcher-related books. In late 2008 we had Claire Berlinski's idiosyncratic There is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, while this month sees the publication of three: a single-volume reissue of John Campbell's superb unauthorised biography, my own account of Thatcher from a Scottish perspective, and finally Thatcher's Britain by the King's College historian Richard Vinen.

The last is a marvellous book: well-written, lucid, balanced and devoid of the rather unpleasant bias present in so many tomes about Mrs Thatcher or Thatcherism. The author is also refreshingly honest. "I was very much opposed to the Thatcher government when it was in power… and I have never been seriously tempted to vote Conservative," he says, in his introduction. "However, I have often felt exasperated by the partisan nature of writing on this subject."

Vinen's book is, therefore, "designed to be dispassionate", and dispassionate it certainly is. He weighs up each aspect of the Thatcher legacy in thematic chapters, and more often than not concludes that what happened was either unavoidable, in some cases inevitable, and often involved considerable bravery on the part of the Cabinet, and particularly the Prime Minister.

High unemployment, for example, did not – as many predicted in the 1980s – lead to societal breakdown but rather "revealed something about the British electorate's real attitude to unemployment" (ie that it would still vote Conservative in spite of it). Vinen also points to some unexpected reactions: one researcher found merchant bankers oozing sympathy, while another saw that "large numbers of unemployed people accepted government explanations for unemployment". A significant minority even voted Conservative.

There are surprises, too, when it comes to the Falklands. Vinen identifies a little-highlighted level of Tory opposition: John Biffen, a monetarist, argued against military action, while Nick Ridley, a future Thatcher favourite, was said to regard the operation to retake the islands as "mad". Its impact on the Left, meanwhile, was more palpable. Labour, according to Vinen, lost its "ability to judge the public mood".

The miners' strike, naturally, brings forth more paradoxes. Vinen writes of picketing miners who felt liberated by being able to spend all day in the open air after years underground, while – despite sympathy for the miners' welfare – every opinion poll showed that the public was dissatisfied with the power exercised by trade unions. As for the government, "Beating the miners was not a radical Thatcherite policy that broke with mainstream Conservatism", but rather a more consensual position which even attracted support from David Owen of the SDP.

Vinen is also refreshingly balanced when it comes to Thatcher's economic legacy, never as uniformly successful as some make out. Always suspicious of City wheeler-dealers, "the fact that a successful banker could expect to be paid several times the salary of a cabinet minister did nothing to smooth relations" between Thatcher and the Conservative Party's merchant banker donors.

Sadly, Vinen is rather weak on Scotland, although it is covered reasonably extensively – along with Wales and Northern Ireland – in a chapter called "Divided Kingdom?" There are some sloppy mistakes. The Tories did not fall to 11 Scottish MPs in 1983 (rather, it was 1987), while there are irritatingly sweeping assertions. One, "Almost every statistic showed that Thatcherism made less progress in Scotland and Wales than in England" is, at the very least, simplistic.

The book's subtitle is also misleading. Thatcher's Britain is not about "The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era", nor is it strictly about how Britain changed under Mrs Thatcher. That account probably belongs in another book, most likely by Messrs Kynaston, Hennessy and Sandbrook once they reach that decade in their respective multi-volume chronologies.

Although Vinen doesn't tell the reader much about Thatcher as a human being, he does add valuable, and often original, insights into her historical legacy. Correctly sceptical about accounts which hinge on acceptance or rejection of the "post-war consensus", he prefers to see "Thatcher as the defender of the post-war consensus…against the 'progressive consensus' of the late 1960s and early 1970s".

Thatcher's Britain is, therefore, a concise and sensible assessment of the most controversial, and arguably one of the most successful, premierships in this nation's modern history. That Vinen is, or was, not a natural sympathiser is especially significant, confirming a growing historical consensus that Thatcherism did more good than harm, as much in Scotland as in the rest of the UK. "I have sought to stress throughout this book", writes Vinen, "that the Thatcher government should be seen as an episode in history rather than an aspect of present-day politics."

In light of the current economic climate the author confesses to doubting that assertion. But will an apparent crisis of capitalism dent the Iron Lady's armour? Judgment on that shall have to wait for future reappraisals.