'Who Dares Wins'

Dominic Sandbrook's history of the early years of Margaret Thatcher's premiership is long, deeply researched and well-worth reading

I recently spent several weeks working through Dominic Sandbrook’s book ‘Who Dares Wins: Britain 1979-1982’. This was my first time reading any of Sandbrook’s work and it reminded me quite a bit of a Tory version of Rick Perlstein. Sandbrook has an immaculately documented history, with plenty of recourse to typical sources and official documents, but what really makes the book pop is the way he weaves in press coverage and reporting from Mass Observation reports. These reports were basically long-running surveys of regular Britons, having them record their thoughts and impressions of life over a series of years. Sandbrook uses these reports to really emphasize the everywoman view of history within his writing. I have to say my knowledge of Great Britain in this period is extremely limited, so this was an interesting deep dive into what seems to have been a crucial transition for the United Kingdom.

The book is also interesting because there are a variety of interesting parallels between the Britain of this time period and the political atmosphere in the US and the UK today. The Thatcher portrayed in ‘Who Dares Wins’ is a decidedly outsider figure trying to navigate a badly split political party in a period of ongoing economic stagnation. Sandbrook takes the reader into some of the internal debates of the early Thatcher cabinets and her prolonged combat with the ‘Wets’ - the moderate, establishment Tory party members that were both integral to her control of the Commons and decidedly incapable of providing an actual alternative. Thatcher is far more a nuanced politician than either her supporters or critics forty years later would allow, trying to thread a needle between what she and her supporters in the cabinet believe is the right policy and what will be acceptable to the broader party. In this she seems to succeed, using interest rates and anti-labor action to slow and eventually reverse high rates of inflation, at the expense of immiserating vast swathes of the industrial countryside. Unemployment in these years rises to levels previously seen in the UK in the post-war period.

Unsurprisingly, this approach was (and is) controversial. Sandbrook does a good job of using Mass Observation reports and newspaper coverage to illustrate the wide range of opinions that existed in the UK around Mrs. Thatcher’s approach. While he is careful to give ample space to the plight of industrial workers, he also makes sure the reader is informed as to the transformative growth taking place in the south of the UK. The rise of the professional class and tech workers is given plentiful pages as well. I had no idea about the UK’s PC industry in the early 1980s but now I’m vaguely aware of both the BBC Micro and the various offerings of Sinclair Research. It’s an interesting contrast to the devastation being wrought throughout the rest of the country.

The book’s final sections focus on the Falklands War. As someone who is involved in the defense industry and has a reasonable understanding of modern military capabilities, it was extremely interesting to see how the UK approached responding to the Argentinian invasion. First, the forces the UK was able to gather and dispatch to the South Atlantic were impressive, especially relative to modern capabilities. According to Wikipedia, 43 Royal Navy (RN) vessels, 22 Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) vessels, and 63 merchant ships were gathered and dispatched in a matter of weeks. To put this in perspective, the RN and the RFA currently only have 83 active ships (which includes HMS Victory, a wooden training ship). Second, the losses suffered were significant - in less than 3 months, over 200 British service members were killed, along with seven ships being sunk. It is difficult to imagine those losses being absorbed so easily today. That’s before we even get into the issues this might pose to the finances of the British government. This fall, the Truss government fell apart in a matter of weeks because it announced overly aggressive tax cuts. It is difficult to imagine the response of bond markets to an intention to burn through tens of millions of pounds over a random island in the South Atlantic. That’s not to say the UK is not a strong ally or militarily capable, it’s just trying to appreciate the drastic changes that have taken place in the last four decades.