Shock Doctrine Series

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts

Thatcher was attempting an English version of Friedmanism by championing what has become known as “the ownership society.” Thatcher’s catastrophic first term seemed to further confirm the lessons of the Nixon years: that the radical and highly profitable policies of the Chicago School couldn’t survive in a democratic system. It seemed clear that the successful imposition of economic shock therapy required some other sort of shock.

Falkland War

The British military’s counter-invasion of the Falklands was code-named Operation Corporate, and though it was an odd name for a military campaign, it proved prescient. From a military standpoint, the eleven-week battle appears to have almost no historic significance. Overlooked, however, was the war’s impact on the free-market project, which was enormous: it was the Falklands War that gave Thatcher the political cover she needed to bring a program of radical capitalist transformation to a Western liberal democracy for the first time.

After the Falklands victory, which took the lives of 255 British soldiers and 655 Argentines, the prime minister was heralded as a war hero, her moniker “Iron Lady” transformed from insult to high praise. Her poll numbers were similarly transformed. Thatcher used the enormous popularity afforded her by the victory to launch the very corporatist revolution that was impossible before the war.

The coal miners went on strike in 1984. Thatcher unleashed the full force of the state on the strikers, including, in a single confrontation, eight thousand truncheon-wielding riot police, many on horseback, to storm a plant picket line, leading to roughly seven hundred injuries. Over the course of the long strike, the number of injuries reached into the thousands.

By 1985, Thatcher had won this war too: workers were going hungry and couldn’t hold out; in the end 966 people were fired. It was a devastating setback for Britain’s most powerful union, and it sent a clear message to the others: if Thatcher was willing to go to the wall to break the coal miners, on whom the country depended for its lights and warmth, it would be suicide for weaker unions producing less crucial products and services t take on her new economic order.

Thatcher used her war to launch the first mass privatization auction in a Western democracy. This was the real Operation Corporate, one with historic implications. She had proved that with a large enough political crisis to rally around, a limited version of shock therapy could be imposed in a democracy. Between 1984 and 1988, the government privatized, among others, British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, British Airport Authority and British Steel, while it sold its shares in British Petroleum.