Iron Britannia

by Anthony Barnett

  On its website the Army claims that the Military Covenant is (with my italics):

  an unbreakable common bond of identity, loyalty and responsibility which has sustained the Army throughout its history32.

  The suggestion is floated that it dates back to Henry VIII, although he did not have a standing army, rather than William the Conqueror, who did; and were those press-ganged into serving in the eighteenth century comforted by the military covenant? Despite the lone but eloquent protest of Dan Hodges in the New Statesman that,

  In a democracy there is no mutuality of obligation between the armed forces and the civil power. The former is subservient to the latter. That is the founding principle on which all democracies are based,33

  the lobbying of the British Legion and General Sir Richard Dannatt, then Chief of the General Staff, overwhelmed all resistance and the Covenant was recognised in law with the Armed Forces Act of November 2011.

  The year before, the Prime Minister had already asked the Ministry of Defence to set up a Task Force on the Military Covenant ‘to help rebuild the covenant’ across the country in an era of cost-cutting. The Task Force’s number-one recommendation was to create a ‘community covenant’ based on a ‘successful US scheme’ to conscript local government into mobilising support for the military through their families. Being a MOD document it defines its terms and the document states: ‘The Military Covenant was coined as a term in 2000.’34

  In other words, the apparently quasi-religious so-called Military Covenant and its influence cannot be ‘rebuilt’ at all. It is a PR concoction counterfeited in the period of Millennium Dome high-Blairism; designed from its conception to have a deep heritage branding – a historic aura that would make it appear intrinsic to British life.35 It worked – it certainly took me in – for who could believe that anyone would be so cynical as to exploit the ultimate sacrifice they claimed to honour? Yet, far from being intrinsically ‘British’ it undermines the country’s long-held tradition, dating back to the founding of the parliament monarchy after 1660, that, while their victories could be celebrated and their sacrifices regularly honoured, the armed forces must always be firmly kept in their place. The rise of Napoleon was seen as a never-to-be-forgotten vindication of this stance – until our new enfeebled century.

  The Dance of Death

  A key point in the process was the BBC’s December 2006 Dimbleby Lecture by General Sir Mike Jackson, Dannatt’s predecessor. The young who ‘put their lives at risk’ for the benefit of the country, Jackson thundered, are owed ‘the tools to do that job’,

  The Armed Forces’ contract with the nation which they serve and from which they very largely recruit is to take risks, if need be, the risk of life. But this must be a two-way contract, it has to be reciprocal. Military operations cost in blood and treasure … It is our soldiers who pay the cost in blood; the nation must therefore pay the cost in treasure.36

  Like the Covenant, Jackson’s claim to a contract is entirely novel. In the era of the great mobilisations of total war, when millions served and bombers destroyed cities, any talk of a ‘contract’ that presumes different ‘interests’ would have been regarded as bizarre. In the era of the Cold War that followed there was no difference between soldiers and civilians should it go hot – all would be irradiated alike and there was a common purpose to it as two different world-systems supposedly confronted each other. Now, Britain expects to ‘project force’ in a fashion pioneered by the Falklands. In the era of market fundamentalism war becomes a higher form of mercenary activity and you go to die for your country thinking of contracts and whether the deal is reciprocal.

  The market also demands new, less deferential forms of public support than displays of Trooping the Colour in its exclusive Whitehall setting, guards in funny bearskin hats, imperial uniforms and elite bling. They are fine for tourists. We need something less status-ridden. The answer, after suitable payment to public-relations consultants, is the United Kingdom’s ‘Armed Forces Day’. Britain celebrated its very first on 28 June 2009. It replaced ‘Veterans Day’, itself launched only in 2006 (both once again being Americanisms).

  The most ghastly expression of this process is the ‘Millies’, the celebration concocted by The Sun, patronised by the young officers William and Harry and apparently to be held annually unless News International is finally closed down as a criminal conspiracy. ‘Millies’ is a generic, tabloid term for all personnel in the military forces of the UK. THE SUN MILITARY AWARD: THEY CRIED WITH PRIDE was the headline in The Sun on 20 December 2011, over a picture of Kate (‘holding back tears’), Duchess of Cambridge. The strapline below it: Royalty and celebs so moved by heroes. Kate was shown presenting Murdoch’s ‘The Most Outstanding Soldier Award’, a large silver phallic object, to a young man who had lost his legs in an act of bravery. The paper had the audacity to tag the story as ‘the latest from the frontline’. Medals? How yesterday is that? Private ceremonies between monarch and subject no longer suffice; ‘our boys’ need to become reality TV to renew the military covenant for the twenty-first century. I must add that the glittering occasion was held ‘in association with BAE Systems’, for the arms industry should not be denied our appreciation of its support for a valuable PR opportunity.37 Poor old General Jackson was well out of date. In order to claim their treasure, soldiers must now pay in spectacle as well as blood.

  The Falklands started this too. The Sun and its sickening, circulation-boosting headlines defined the war’s public relations as it bullied and shaped opinion. The Murdoch machine did more than urge on Maggie. GOTCHA – the headline on the first editions’ report on the torpedoing of the Belgrano – became the expression of what Thatcher did to the Tory Party and the country and what The Sun did to us British as we were recruited to become tabloid patriots. I pointed out how a Task Force that was welcomed as a spiritual throwback to Britain’s imperial pomp became a forerunner of high-tech warfare. It also initiated a new relationship between the public, the media and the armed forces. Still in its beta phase, as internet developers might say, media sensationalism around ‘human interest’ stories serves to legitimate military autonomy, permit their open lobbying and even encourage the direct criticism of government policy by serving generals, who once would have been dismissed for such insubordination.

  American norms exercise a baleful influence. The idea that veterans must be accorded a special civilian status because public welfare is so poor belongs over the pond, not here. It’s odd, how those most enthusiastic for this loss of our distinctiveness and our becoming spiritually the fifty-first state of the union can also be ferocious in banging the drum of British independence. Whether it is bad faith or self-deception, insolence towards Washington alongside actual dependency reached an extraordinary intensity during the Falklands conflict. The full extent of US logistic and material support emerged only after I wrote Iron Britannia – there was massive, secret US backing from the outset, ordered from the Pentagon by US Secretary of Defence Caspar Weinberger, with President Reagan’s private support. Formally, Washington was neutral through the first month with openly pro-Argentinian sentiment in the State Department expressed by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s Ambassador to the UN. But Weinberger had ordered that, ‘all requests for military equipment … or other types of support, short of our actual participation in their military action, should be granted immediately’.38

  Weinberger shifted Reagan’s scepticism into support, until the President tried to make peace after the British landed and Thatcher thwarted him. But from the outset he permitted the vital US material support essential for victory. Without millions of gallons of US-supplied fuel the Task Force would not have got to the islands; US satellite intelligence provided the pin-point location of targets for the naval bombardment of Argentine positions when the final land battles took place, and ‘Without … the latest version of the Sidewinder air-to-air missiles supplied by Caspar Weinberger, we could not have retaken the Falklands’, Thatcher notes in her memoir. Free
dman’s Official History says the importance of Weinberger’s support ‘is hard to overstate’.39

  For when it left Portsmouth the Task Force did not set sail for the Falklands, it headed for Ascension Island. Only 34 square miles but right in the middle of the Atlantic, it is a British possession housing an American airbase and intelligence facilities. Here the Task Force was secretly fuelled and armed by the US from the start. Today, as the cuts to the UK’s military budgets are criticised, you can often read that they could leave Britain unable to take back the Falkland islands if there is another attack. Britain was never able to take them back on its own. The Falklands confirmed rather than defied the material dependency of the UK on the US for any exercise of global power.

  This should be an important, even a profoundly important, psychological fact about the kind of country Britain actually is and the chimera of an independent ‘world role’. Instead it has reinforced fantasy and self-deception. A comic example came in a contorted attack on Iron Britannia by the ultra-Thatcherite Alan Clark writing in the Guardian on the first anniversary. A year after 1982, when the scale of US aid was public knowledge, he presents the Falklands victory as a defiant challenge to US power, celebrates the way it was diminished and accuses me of ‘lining up’ with Reagan and Kirkpatrick, as if the President opposed Thatcher.40 Clark could not have been more wrong, not just about me but about the somewhat more important question of the might of the USA. Far from being diminished by the Falklands it was enhanced by Thatcher’s expedition. The Task Force it fuelled in no way upset the Monroe Doctrine, it gave the Pentagon much useful experience, tested logistics systems, pioneered managing the media by ‘embedding’ journalists, and locked the UK into the US network as never before, allowing the Pentagon to win a war it didn’t declare or have to fight.

  The Thatcher She

  A justified criticism of the book came from Neal Ascherson in his review. He is generous about my discussion of Churchillism but points out that I treat Thatcher too lightly, blaming Michael Foot and Parliament more than her for what transpired.41 The accounts we now have strengthen Ascherson’s point. I was concerned with resisting a facile left-wing blaming-it-all-on-the-Thatcher, as if the responsibility was not shared. When the Belgrano went down most of the left were speechless with disbelief. They lost their voice when I found mine. To make my stand I had to identify with Churchillism, in the sense of recognising it as the foundation for my oppositional patriotism: my claim upon a country whose capacity for oppression I also recognised. I was prepared for this by quite different circumstances.

  From the mid-seventies, I had been immersed in a study of Vietnam. This drew me into examining the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and the role of China. In 1979 the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping ordered a massive invasion of Vietnam in support of Pol Pot. I analysed what happened for Bruce Page’s New Statesman and continued to cover developments in Indochina. The experience qualified me in two crucial ways to respond to what then happened in my own country. I had learnt how to write fast about quite complicated current affairs, and I was no stranger to violent nationalism. Indeed. I had learnt an even more valuable lesson about the dark forces harboured on one’s own side. This helped me to recognise rather than disavow in myself the full panoply of Churchillism. It means that Iron Britannia is not written from the point of view of any ‘ism’. (Alan Clark tried to suggest otherwise, but the effort defeated him.) Instead, it became the starting point for a journey towards an English republican democracy that is neither reformist in the Labour sense of working within Churchillism, or revolutionary in the Leninist sense of refusing all patriotism as false-consciousness.

  As for Margaret Thatcher, there can be no doubt of her singular management of the Falklands campaign. She administered it exceptionally well, handling the Cabinet, the US, the UN, the media and Parliament, giving the military everything they wanted. She proved that she could ‘run things’ under immense pressure. She opens the two chapters on the Falklands in her memoirs saying, ‘Nothing remains more vividly in my mind, looking back on my years in No. 10, than the eleven weeks in the spring of 1982 when Britain fought and won the Falklands War.’42 She knew at the time those weeks would make her or see her destroyed.

  The degree to which she succeeded in the war against her own party was not clear to me. Philip Whitehead, who was a Labour MP, told me much later that when he was on his way to the special Saturday debate in the Commons he fell in with a friendly Tory colleague, who rubbed his hands with anticipation and said ‘Now, we have got her.’

  And how about this for urinal intelligence, from her successor John Major? He describes his astonishment at the way the Commons ‘resembled mob rule’ on the Saturday and the utterly savage treatment of ministers by Tory MPs in the subsequent private meeting of the party.

  If the Cabinet had not sent the Task Force, Margaret Thatcher would not have survived as prime minister. She took a great risk requiring huge nerve, but the alternative was certainly catastrophe. I overheard a washroom conversation in which two Cabinet ministers denounced the expedition as ‘ludicrous’ and ‘a folly’ due to the lack of air cover for the fleet. It gave me a glimpse of the tensions that existed at the heart of government.43

  Thatcher was fighting for her political life against her own party colleagues while the mass media and a significant, vocal section of the public, their passion for hooliganism aroused, was up for a bigger fight, air cover or no. She delivered it. She describes her greatest crisis of the war being when Francis Pym, the then Foreign Secretary, came back from the UN with a peace offer.44 She persuaded the Cabinet to reject it.

  We’d be a better country if the Argentinian Junta had never invaded the Falklands, betraying the Argentinian people by their ‘diversion’, as Sean Penn puts it.45 Things would have been much better still if voters had then ejected Thatcher from No. 10 and her frittering away the extraordinary opportunity of North Sea Oil revenues had been reversed. It would also have been better if, after the Junta’s occupation, there had been a peaceful settlement based on the equality of forces made possible once the US had ended its neutrality (which it did subsequent to the failure of the deal Pym proposed).

  However, Thatcher did not see it like this, although many did. She wasn’t just fighting to survive: she grasped at the opportunity to dominate against the odds in London. She saw it was worth risking everything for this – and after all, with Cabinet colleagues like hers, figuratively pissing on her loudly in the loos of Westminster, what was the alternative?

  Her Cheltenham victory speech got little publicity, perhaps because it seemed so embarrassing. In the days long before the web it was an effort for me to get hold of the transcript, which is why I reproduced it in full at the end of Iron Britannia in 1982. It deserves to be read, as it is a clear enough declaration of her intention to bring the war home. At the end of that part of her memoir she simply quotes in full the section, ‘We have ceased to be a nation in retreat’ which concludes: ‘Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.’ It is said that Thatcher knew how to play her gender in a man’s world. Clearly, we are meant to understand that the ‘she’ in ‘the victory she has won’ refers to both Britain and the Prime Minister and that the victory is hers.

  What Should Britain Do Now?

  There are two issues any reader of Iron Britannia today may want to bear in mind: about the Falklands and the state of British politics with respect to its Churchillist inheritance.

  David Jones visited the Falklands two years after the conflict as a journalist and was so alienated by the ‘grim depressing place’, the scorn of UK troops for the locals and the fighting between them; he thought the war not worth it. He returned this year to report in the Daily Mail that it is becoming an island paradise. The big, decayed estates once controlled by absentee British landlords have been broken up and are worked by local owners. Huge Antarctic cruise ships dock and spill out avaricious souvenir hunters. Japanese demand fo
r squid, and proper control of the sea around the Falklands, brings in over £100 million a year in fishing permits. The population has doubled as support for the thousand-strong British garrison, tourism and oil exploration brings in new families.46 Also reporting for the Daily Mail, Caroline Graham painted an even more extraordinary picture last summer. Seven families have become millionaires thanks to the fishing bonanza. The average household income is £45,000 (the UK’s is £25,000),

  Islanders enjoy free healthcare and education up to university level. A new secondary school teaches children up to GCSE level. Pupils are then offered free flights, have all tuition fees paid and get £8,000 a year to study at colleges and universities in the UK.47

  And this is before the oil begins to flow.

  In an amusing passage Simon Jenkins recounts how after the Falklands War,

  I once heard her iconoclastic adviser Alan Walters, at a Downing Street lunch, suggesting that it would have been cheaper to give every islander a million pounds to vote to resettle in Switzerland or anywhere. Thatcher was incandescent, shouting at him about Judas and ‘pieces of silver’.48