Iron Britannia

by Anthony Barnett

  It would, of course, have been a far more humane as well as much more economical solution, with no loss of lives, and anyway Argentina should have paid. Today, however, Buenos Aires will find it hard to raise enough money to make an attractive offer to buy the islanders out of their privileged toehold. It seems that the Junta’s invasion has lost the country a valuable archipelago.

  That’s before the oil, apparently discovered in very large quantities, tens of billions of barrels’ worth. I was interviewed on the Stephen Nolan Show on BBC’s 5 Live on 10 February this year, along with the Honourable Jan Cheek on the line from Port Stanley. She is a member of the eight-strong Falklands ‘legislative assembly’. She said, ‘If there is oil in the Falklands … then like the natural resources of any overseas territories it belongs to the Falkland Islands.’ (The well-named Cheek recently sold her late husband’s Fortuna fishing company to a fellow Falklander for £8 million.49) I replied that it is dangerous nonsense to think that British lives should be put at risk to claim all the oil for 200 miles around the Falklands in the deep South Atlantic. This should be negotiated with Argentina. Mrs Cheek replied that the people of the Falkland Islands have the right to self-determination like New Zealand. I pointed out that they are not a people.50

  There are two critical points here. The Falklanders are natives of a British dependency covered by the UN Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories (Articles 73 and 74 of the UN Charter). Article 73 stipulates, ‘the interests of the inhabitants of the territories are paramount’. But ‘interests’ are not the same as their wishes. These interests include taking account of their ‘political aspirations’ as well as the need to ‘further international peace and security’. Article 74 states that policy must be based ‘on the general principle of good-neighbourliness, due account being taken of the interests and well-being of the rest of the world, in social, economic, and commercial matters’.

  In Chapter 7, as the reader can see for him- or herself, I develop the argument that the lesson of appeasement in 1938 is that where a well-founded territorial dispute exists the inhabitants of the territory do not have the sole right to determine the outcome as they wish. A people have the right to self-determination but that is different from determining between sovereignties. The Falklands may be the size of Wales but they are not a country, they are a settlement. As such, the settlers cannot themselves alone decide that Britain must spend millions to defend their cashing in on the all the oil revenues of their Atlantic pastime. This is also up to us.

  The real argument will be here in the UK between those people of sense and the lobbyists for the army, navy and air-force, slavering over the opportunity of all the new kit, live training and extra funding that conflict in the South Atlantic brings with it.

  In principle, then, the UK government can insist on making peace with Argentina and reaching a negotiated agreement about the rights to the oil resources, as the government in Buenos Aires has requested, bearing in mind the duty to protect the interests of the islanders but, if necessary, going over their heads. Argentina cannot possibly mount an invasion without losing many thousands of lives against the well-entrenched, state-of-the-art British emplacements. More important, all Brits should want to reach such an agreement. We should want to demilitarise the South Atlantic and withdraw, with everyone’s interests secured. It is bad for British politics to have the Falklands implanted in our leaders’ brains, so that it matters far more to them than the fate of, say, Birmingham, England’s second city.

  Most important of all, the Falklands Syndrome needs to be extracted from our leaders and from public life and values, rather than having concern for the Falkland Islanders projected on the screen of the national-popular back in Blighty. Achieving such an extraction may require a mighty effort. In After Empire, Paul Gilroy observes the melancholia that underpins British culture and notes, ‘we are returned time and again to the instrumentalization and trivialization of war … primary symptoms of this whole cultural complex’.51 Instrumental trivialisation neatly encapsulates the Prime Minister’s Camp Bastion rallying cry, to revere the military and place it at the centre of our national life. Behind its flaccid ideology and bad poetry lies an altogether more serious securitisation of the state in cahoots with corporate power. Gilroy calls for ‘conviviality’ to take over from such melancholy late-Churchillist pretentiousness. It sounds easy enough but it will need a sweeping and seriously organised democratic patriotism, commitment to modern liberty and international solidarity to replace it – drawing on traditions that were preserved yet also locked away in Churchillism after 1940, and freed from its integument.

  That whole ensemble needs to be honoured – and buried. We need to grow in its place a democratic constitutionalism that calls on the tradition of Blake, the author of England’s anthem, and the Leveller Rainsborough, to take just two examples from a much larger conversation. The latter famously claimed that ‘the poorest he that is in England has a right to live as the greatest he’. He said this when he spoke in the Putney debates of 1647. Sixteen words, seventy-two characters (half a tweet), they are the first, compressed expression of modern democratic politics: asserting the moral equality of all while recognising difference, emphasising life and location not race or essence, and making a claim of right in a shared society. Spoken by a soldier in a debate within Cromwell’s army, at a turning point in our Civil War, they were and are profoundly civilian, and so are we.

  A year after the end of the Falklands War, in June 1983, I gave a twenty-five-minute illustrated ‘Opinions’ talk on Channel 4 setting out why it was time to take the great out of Britain. As it carries forward a theme of Iron Britannia written at the time I have added it as a third additional text in this new edition. I was still at the beginning of a journey and I asked simply that the country become a normal democracy and drop its destructive illusions.

  The day after it was transmitted, as I was collecting my daughter from school, a man came up to me outside the gates. He looked at me closely and asked, ‘Did I see you on television last night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I recognised your glasses.’

  He stood even closer and stared at me quite hard. I braced myself. Then he spoke emphatically:

  ‘I said to myself, I am not alone.’

  Notes

  1. Sleaford Gazette, 29 June 1945, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/10081

  2. After the speech he delivered in Chicago, 24 April 1999, calling for international intervention. Ten years later he revisited Chicago and told its Council on Global Affairs that the spirit of his ‘doctrine’ was ‘Be bold, adventurous, even’.

  3. See Nigel West, The Secret War For The Falklands: SAS, MI6 and the War Whitehall Nearly Lost, London, 1997

  4. Lawrence Freedman, The Official History of the Falklands Campaign, Vol. I., London, 2005, p. 2

  5. Quoted in Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, London, 1992, p 54

  6. That’s how I recall it; the exact quote is in the book.

  7. David Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine, London, 2011, p. 48.

  8. Kenneth Harris, Attlee, London, 1984, pp. 169–70, 178.

  9. Francis Wheen, Strange Days Indeed, London, 2009, p. 218

  10. The main alternative outside the Tory party was the SDP, a new party founded by a breakaway group of senior Labour politicians headed by Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and David Owen. Looking back, we can see there were two might-have-beens had the Falklands not happened. First, an actual hung parliament in 1983 with Tory voters defecting to the SDP in as many numbers as Labour ones did, whereupon Heath and a group of about twenty supporters could have joined a ‘national coalition’ (See John Campbell, Edward Heath, London, 1993, pp. 725–33). Right-wing Labour MPs would have then followed, an alliance prefigured by the 1975 referendum on remaining in the European Union. Or, second, the SDP would have gained the larger number of popular votes and significantly more seats, whereupon with massive media support and Lab
our defections it would have become the second party and won in 1987. Of course, the Argentinian regime might have waited three months and seized the islands in their winter making any Task Force impossible and Thatcher would have fallen, perhaps to be replaced by the thrusting Heseltine. All three, Jenkins, Heath and Heseltine, would have given industrial renewal much greater priority (not to speak of Tony Benn – the City and the US would have prevented him from being Prime Minister but he represented an anti-European ‘Norwegian’ alternative).

  11. When the Poll Tax was under discussion, ‘the Home Office produced a Cabinet paper expressing its concern that it would be seen as a “tax on voting”. When the Conservatives’ narrow victory became clear on election night in 1992, Margaret Thatcher was quoted by the Sunday Telegraph (12 April 1992) as saying, “the Poll Tax worked after all”.’ Anthony Barnett, This Time, London, 1997, p. 179.

  12. Robert Menzies Lecture, Monash University, 6 October 1981, (wording from Thatcher Foundation archive), see Edward Heath, John Campbell, London, 1993, p. 734.

  13. Simon Jenkins, who sets out clearly how Thatcher was culpable for the Falklands fiasco in the first place, interviewed Franks and put it to him straight that his report was a ‘whitewash’. Apparently, ‘he paused a long time and told me to remember that he was addressing a nation in the aftermath of victory. “There is a time and a place for blame,” he said. He then did what whitewashers always do and asked me sternly to … read between the lines. But politics never reads between the lines.’ Thatcher and Sons, London, 2007, pp. 73–4.

  14. Lawrence Freedman, The Official History of the Falklands Campaign, Vol. II, London, 2005, p. 20.

  15. The naval shelling of Argentine positions was critical for the success of the attack on the well-dug-in Argentinian forces around Port Stanley. In the final advance ‘5,500 rounds were fired at 40 targets’. ‘When the campaign ended there was barely enough ammunition left for a further two days’ bombardment, and further supplies weeks away.’ Freedman, Official History, Vol. II, p. 632.

  16. ‘A crescendo of rage was registered at the time of the Falklands Thanksgiving Service when the Archbishop of Canterbury courageously refused to recognise that God was British. Sir John Biggs-Davison spoke of “cringing clergy” who were “misusing” St Paul’s to call the war into question … The Prime Minister was variously reported as “hopping mad” or “spitting blood” at the insult to national honour.’ Raphael Samuel, ‘The Tory Party at Prayer’ in Island Stories, Theatres of Memory, Vol. II, p. 324–5. There is also a dry account of the negotiations over the service in Freedman, Official History, Vol. II, pp. 663–4.

  17. For example, my younger daughter started in a north London school in 1996 to find there was a new national curriculum but no budget for text- or course-books.

  18. On the addiction, see John Kampfner’s responsible and farsighted Blair’s Wars, London, 2003.

  19. John Harris, Guardian, 12 December 2011.

  20. Daniel Hannan, Daily Telegraph, 22 December 2011.

  21. Taken from different parts of David Cameron’s first speech to a Conservative Party Conference as Prime Minister, Birmingham, 6 October 2010.

  22. Tim Shipman, at Camp Bastion, Daily Mail, 11 June 2010.

  23. See Peter Oborne, The Triumph of the Political Class, London, 2007; Anthony Barnett, ‘After Murdoch’, in OurKingdom/openDemocracy, 17 July 2011, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/after-murdoch.

  24. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, London, 2011, pp. 173, 202.

  25. Vron Ware, ‘Lives on the Line’, Soundings, 45, London, 2010.

  26. I make this point in the book as someone who simply followed the media. Six years later the Tumbledown team searched for human images and photographs to authenticate their filming and found none. I’m grateful to Richard Eyre for talking to me about its production. One book did graphically illustrate the horrors on both sides, Raymond Biggs’ The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman, a raw graphic novel (in which those crippled by their wounds are excluded from the victory celebrations), London 1984.

  27. Mrs Sambles, Bridport News, 18 June 1982.

  28. See Ware, ‘Lives on the Line’.

  29. As the novel The Skinback Fusiliers implies, by Unknown Soldier, UK, 2001, see http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/collections/skinback-fusiliers.

  30. See Henry Porter, Observer, 5 July 2009, ‘This is a good moment to recall the theory of Gilles Dorronsoro of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who wrote in January: “The mere presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important factor in the resurgence of the Taliban.” That same point was hinted at by a British commander quoted in Patrick Bishop’s book, Ground Truth. Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, who led 16 Air Assault to Helmand, made an odd aside in a report back to London before the real trouble began: “There is not to my mind an insurgency in Helmand. But we can create one if we want to.”’

  31. Matt Chorley, Independent on Sunday, 15 May 2011; James Chapman and Katherine Faulkner, Daily Mail, 25 June 2010.

  32. Army Home Page, Serving Solider, The military Covenant, http://www.webcitation.org/5bDqxkYo3.

  33. Dan Hodges, ‘Why the Military Covenant should not be made Law’, New Statesman, 16 May 2011.

  34. Report of the Task Force on the Military Covenant, chaired by Professor Hew Strachan, Ministry of Defence, September 2010.

  35. Thus, backed by market research, a supermarket might launch a product line of ‘Traditional Covenant Biscuits’, including Henry8s ‘The oat flapjack men ate when Elizabeth I was just a girl’.

  36. Mike Jackson, ‘Defence of the Realm in the 21st Century’, 2006 Richard Dimbleby Lecture, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/12_december/07/dimbleby.shtml.

  37. Report by Virginia Wheeler, The Sun, 20 December 2011.

  38. Freedman, Official History, Vol. II, p. 155.

  39. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, London, 2011, p. 226; Freedman, Official History, Vol. II, pp. 155–6 and Chapter 26 on ‘American Support’.

  40. Alan Clark, ‘The Falklands Triumph that Confounded the Pessimists’, Guardian, 4 April 1983.

  41. Neal Ascherson, ‘By San Carlos Water’, London Review of Books, 18 November–1 December 1982.

  42. Margaret Thatcher, Downing Street Years, p. 173.

  43. John Major, The Autobiography, London, 1999, pp. 76–7.

  44. Margaret Thatcher, Downing Street Years, p. 208.

  45. Sean Penn, ‘The Malvinas/Falklands: Diplomacy Interrupted’, Guardian, 23 February, 2012.

  46. David Jones, Daily Mail, 28 January 2012.

  47. Caroline Graham, Daily Mail, 2 July 2012.

  48. Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons, p. 77.

  49. Caroline Graham, Daily Mail, 2 July 2012.

  50. For the transcript of the exchange see http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/falklands-rising

  51. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London, 2004, p 128.

  * I asked a lot of people what they recalled of the Falklands War, or thought about it if they were too young to remember. I’d like to thank them all. I am particularly indebted to my co-editors on open Democracy’s British section, OurKingdom, Niki Seth Smith and Clare Sambrook; to both Tamara Barnett-Herrin and Judith Herrin for helping greatly with the text; and at Fabers to Neil Belton for his help and suggestions and especially my editor Richard T. Kelly, who gave new meaning to grace under pressure and strengthened the argument with his wise probing of its weaknesses.

  ‘I had the winter at the back of my mind. The winter. What will the winter do? The wind, the cold. Down in South Georgia the ice, what will it do? It beat Napoleon at Moscow.’

  (Margaret Thatcher, Daily Express, 26 July 1982)

  Preface to the First Edition

  This essay was begun on 16 May and grew in response to events. Originally intended as a pamphlet, the first
book length draft was finished on 14 June, the day that white flags were reported over Port Stanley. My concern was not with the fighting but with why Britain went to war when it need not have—the ease with which this was done, and the lack of serious political opposition. I have not tried to establish what motivated Margaret Thatcher on a day-to-day basis, therefore, although such a history would be valuable. Rather, I have tried to explore the political culture that generated the war on the British side. My hope is that this might encourage people in the UK to make it more difficult next time.

  Although I have criticized Argentina’s own aggressive policy in its international context, I have not presumed to analyse its domestic politics. I am happy to leave to others the important work of exposing the Junta’s role.

  Most of Iron Britannia appeared as the special August issue of New Left Review. I would like to thank, individually and collectively, all of my fellow editors for their rapid and supportative response to the first draft. In particular, Robin Blackburn encouraged me to embark upon the project and suggested many valuable ideas; Fred Halliday made detailed and effective written comments, and, above all, Mike Davis edited the text with enthusiasm, improved it throughout and shared the final, white nights of preparation.

  This edition contains a new chapter (No 5) with some reflections on the nature of public and media support for the war. Along with various small changes I have also added some paragraphs to the discussion on Thatcherism and to the penultimate section on the issues of principle raised by the conflict. If, before embarking, the reader wants to know what my ‘position’ is on the Falklands, he or she should glance through that chapter (No 7).

  I have been very fortunate to benefit from the advice and encouragement of Neil Belton, John Berger, Hugh Brody, Peter Fuller, Andrew Gamble, Judith Herrin and Frances Walsh. The Transnational Institute has supported me patiently and generously, it gives me great pleasure to be able to thank it publicly. Finally, I am grateful to the publishers who said ‘Yes, quick’.