Iron Britannia

by Anthony Barnett

  Naturally Thatcher was obliged to do something if only to secure her own back-bench support. She had already announced that a task force was in preparation. Yet she did so with nervousness rather than self-confidence at the beginning of the debate. After Foot’s demand, it became instead an Armada sailing at the behest of the House with the Prime Minister at the helm: the Commons nationalized Thatcher’s style of leadership—it was an Iron Britannia that emerged.

  Why did this take place? A key reason is the national and institutional place of Parliament itself and the false history which it gives to the ruling parties. When the House of Commons was bombed during the last world war, Churchill insisted that it be rebuilt to exactly the old specifications, as a stuffy chamber without desks. It remains today an artificially reconstructed club that has never taken the measure of its collapse from being the seat of Empire and arbiter of world history, so that it appears to us today like a political institution from the age of dinosaurs. A monstrous beast, capable of great noise and immeasurable consumption of putrid vegetable matter, it believes that it has been chosen to dominate the surface of the globe, yet it has a disproportionately tiny brain.

  In the House of Commons today, usually irrelevant and empty dramas are acted out in an anachronistic language. This has led many to think that it is no longer important and that power has passed to other places and circles. Not at all. Parliament is the seat of British sovereignty, especially in matters of war and peace, with which sovereignty is so directly connected. Parliament proved this on 3 April. Its frothing and raging were all the purer for being brought about by an object as insignificant as the Falklands. The mated, mutual evocation of the principles of British sovereignty by the leaders of all parties led to the almost instant birth of the Task Force. Together they made a consensus of extremism. Michael Foot has written in praise of Disraeli for refusing to ‘bow to the House of Commons in one of those swelling tempers when it converts itself into a mob’.5 On 3 April 1982, it was Foot himself who became the leader of the pack.

  Doubtless it is not simply the institution of Parliament alone which is to blame. The law courts with their archaic distinctions; the Oxbridge system; the feebleness of the civil service; the font of ‘excellence’ in Britain, the public school system—these are all part and parcel of the ruling arch, but one in which Parliament is the keystone. How can one describe the extraordinary influence of this political culture? Little incidents capture its flavour more than anything. In mid-May I had reason to talk to a stranger in Trafalgar Square. I wanted to ask him about the number of a bus which had gone by. He was a friendly looking man, probably in his 50s, with a moustache and a stiff white collar, smoking an excellent cigar. So I asked him about the latest news from the South Atlantic, and then his opinion of the matter. ‘It’s noblesse oblige really, don’t you think? Noblesse oblige. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to hold our head up high in the world’. I pointed out that they might sink the Queen Elizabeth, which would not do much for our world standing. He agreed that was the risk we had to run. It wasn’t jingoism. It wasn’t said with any love of battle. There wasn’t any hatred of dagoes. Duty demanded it. We parted with a cheerio.

  The attitude he expressed would seem as warm, as understandable and as irrelevant as the reminiscence of an immigrant grandfather about the Russo-Japanese war. It was not a chance encounter, in that the majority of those who think of themselves as members of a ruling elite in Britain share his wavelength. The only important qualification to add is that they remain skilful enough to stifle, if not silence completely, those voices which are radically different. Evidence of this during the Falklands crisis was the way the Financial Times appeared to be a straggler in the wilderness. It was unable to condemn the government unequivocally, yet all its reason told it that the affair was absurd. The bourgeois rationality of capital, or, if that sounds too heavy, the plain calculation of good business, was almost unbearably self-evident. The Falklands were hardly worth a toss. It would be necessary to protect the way of life of its British community, of course, because how else could one be sure of safeguards for foreign business communities in Argentina or elsewhere? But the issue of sovereignty-and-righteousness could not be taken seriously in the absence of any definable substance, especially when it put at risk the very considerable interests of the City and British capital in Argentina and Latin America generally.

  Yet in the House of Commons it was seen exactly the other way around. The invasion of the Falklands was nothing but an infringement of its dominion. Therefore, oddly enough, Argentina’s action was completely and overwhelmingly an assault upon British rule itself: the House of Commons and the Crown. It was not just the insult of having one’s small toe pinched by a Third World upstart that was humiliating. Because successive Governments had been trying to rid themselves of the islands and secure a closer relationship with Buenos Aires, because nobody in the Commons actually cared very much if at all about the islanders, because they were anyway so few in number that they could easily have been given munificent compensation—a point we will come to in a moment—because, in other words, there were no interests involved, it was purely a matter of spirit. Britain’s ‘standing’ in the world was at stake. This was everything! Nothing real was being contested, therefore that most dangerously unreal aspect of international relations was at risk, the very aura of sovereignty itself, the sacred cow of the world order: credibility.

  Each party, feeling the domestic crisis breathing down its neck, rallied in its own way to the call of history and the nation’s ‘honour’. Some leapt for joy, others scurried, many panted to catch up, plenty caught the whiff of intimidation, the job was done: the MPs had rallied to the flag. Only a despised 5% of them, mainly from the Labour left managed some co-ordinated dissent later in the war.6 They were quite unable to make any impact on the crucial first day when it began. One of them, Tarn Dalyell, has argued that this was all due to chance and that if the invasion had taken place on a Thursday, say, rather than a Friday when MPs were dispersed, then wiser councils would have prevailed—especially his own on the response of the Labour front-bench.7 This is implausible, but Dalyell is right to stress that the role of Labour was crucial in the affair. He goes so far as to say that had Thatcher not known in advance that Labour would call for ‘deeds’, she would not have announced the sending of the fleet. But even if she had, it could not have been sent into combat without the initial unity of Parliament.

  Dalyell’s account of the 3 April debate is especially interesting in one respect. The leaders of the House colluded to ensure that it was kept brief. The Commons assembled for the special Saturday session to set the country’s face to war and adjourned after a mere three hours, during which the opening and closing speeches of the four front-bench speakers took nearly an hour and a half. Yet an attempt by one MP to have the time extended to five hours, so that more opinions could be heard, was voted down by the MPs themselves. The real judgement of such a collective is revealed precisely in adversity, when its response to a crisis matters. The combination of instinct, collaboration and procedure defined the true methods of British parliamentary rule.

  The united House of Commons ensured a ‘united nation’ prepared to go into battle. As Peter Jenkins put it, it was not Thatcher’s war but ‘Parliament’s war’, because of this.8 It is therefore necessary, if we are to inquire into our rulers’ capacity for dangerous folly, to examine the construction of this unity itself. And while it was a British occasion on 3 April, other states armed like the United Kingdom with nuclear weapons, are just as capable of their own demonstrations of sovereign pride. I will look at each of the speeches made during the great debate on that day, a fascinating compendium. What does the ‘true spirit’ of the nation actually look and feel like? How does Great Britain go to war? Is this indeed the renaissance of a democracy discovering the virtues of firmness in a just cause? Is this the bedrock health of Britain? Or rather, when we look upon the proceedings of a united House of Commons do we find ou
rselves in the presence of the British disease itself?

  Notes

  1 Guardian, 10 July 1982.

  2 Economist, 3 July 1982, p. 29; Observer, 11 July 1982.

  3 Guardian, 6 July 1982.

  4 The Times, 5 April 1982.

  5 Michael Foot, Debts of Honour, London 1980, p.55.

  6 After the debate on 20 May 1982, on the eve of the landings, 33 MPs voted against the use of force. Among them was Tony Benn (whose Falkland speeches can be read in E.N.D. Papers 3, Summer 1982); Tarn Dalyell, the Labour spokesman for science, who fought Thatcher’s militarism throughout; Andrew Faulds, Labour spokesman for the arts, who made a speech of outstanding vigour; Judith Hart, the current Chairperson of the Labour Party. Science and Art were promptly sacked as front-bench spokesmen, and were joined by Agriculture as Gavin Strang, Labour’s spokesman for that industry, resigned, because although obliged to be absent from the vote he opposed the war. Two Plaid Cymru MPs also voted against the assault; their party was the only one to oppose the fighting officially.

  7 London Review of Books, 20 May 1982.

  8 At an oecumenical ‘Teach-In Against the War’, organized by the Socialist Society in London, 3 June 1982.

  2 The Crackpot Parliament

  ‘I slightly bridle when the word ‘democracy’ is applied to the United Kingdom. Instead of that I say, ‘we are a Parliamentary nation’. If you … put us into the jar labelled ‘Democracy’, I can’t complain: I can only tell you that you have understood very little about the United Kingdom.’

  (Enoch Powell, interviewed in The Guardian, 15 June 1982)

  BEFORE WE examine the specific contributions to the assemblage of ‘national unity’ invoked on 3 April, some background information is essential. The British went to war in a welter of fine words about protecting the right of peoples to ‘self-determination’, and the need to repel aggression so as to ensure that it does not ‘pay’. Hardly a word of this was meant by those who actually insisted upon a military consummation. For a start, they sank the General Belgrano quite illegally, which unleashed the real righting war. The importance of these questions is considerable only because a great number of people who were not directly involved took them seriously. So I will discuss them towards the end of this essay, as principles in their own right. But in order to follow what happened in Parliament on 3 April, the questions posed by the specific, ambiguous status of the Falkland Islands should be registered.

  Historically, it transpires that British officials have long had doubts as to the legitimacy of their country’s claim to the Falklands. In 1910 Foreign Office memos thought Argentina’s claim ‘not altogether unjustified’. In the 1930s some kind of transfer of sovereignty was considered. In 1940 a file was titled, ‘Proposed offer by HMG to reunite Falkland Islands with Argentina and acceptance of lease’. (The Sunday Times analysis emphasizes the word ‘reunite’). In 1946 a UK internal research paper described the British seizure of the Islands in 1833 as an ‘act of unjustified aggression’.1 Since 1965, when Argentina raised the issue at the United Nations, London and Buenos Aires have been negotiating. According to the Economist, ‘the Argentines were encouraged to pursue a negotiated settlement by the fact that almost every British minister with whom they dealt came to recognize at least the de facto force of their claim’.2

  What was the substance of this ‘recognition’? It was perhaps summed up in a still confidential report by Labour’s Ted Rowlands who visited the Falklands on behalf of the Callaghan government in 1977. His conclusion was ‘keep British sovereignty over the islanders, but give Argentina sovereignty over the territory’. It was ‘the people, not the land itself’ which seemed to him to constitute the crucial issue.3 This distinction was met by a ‘leaseback’ proposal in which sovereignty would be granted to Argentina while government control remained in the hands of Britain. Rowlands’s successor in the Thatcher administration was Nicholas Ridley who continued to pursue such a settlement. But before he went out to the Falklands in 1980 to consult the islanders, he was apparently subjected to a ‘fearful mauling’ for his ideas by the Prime Minister. Denied a clear mandate and restricted to presenting the leaseback idea as a mere ‘option’, the fate of Ridley’s mission was predictable: ‘The younger and more cosmopolitan islanders tended to be sympathetic to some accommodation with Argentina; and the view was that between a third and a half of the 1,800 population might have accepted some form of leaseback. Islanders of this persuasion argue that, had Mr Ridley come down with a firm announcement that the islanders had now to rethink their future, that the British were seeking leaseback and would compensate any islander who wanted to leave, the mood might have been more constructive. But Mr Ridley had been given no such mandate by the Cabinet’.4

  We can therefore discern both a main current of British policy and an undercurrent pulling against it. The major thrust was to achieve a settlement that protected the lives of the resident people while assigning formal sovereignty of the terrain to Argentina. The undertow was primarily a Tory intransigence, shared by Thatcher, that played up the islanders’ additional wish to ‘remain British’ and ran counter to their evident best interests, and even the desires of many or perhaps most of them.

  Argentina meanwhile tried to woo the islanders. The ‘Malvinas’ could become ‘the most pampered region’ of the country if they joined it, and Argentinian officials specifically offered ‘a democratic form of government, a different legal system, different customs, a different form of education. The only thing they wanted was sovereignty’.5 It will help to bear these facts in mind when considering the response of British political classes to the Falklands crisis. Labour and Conservative governments had been striving to ensure that local law and administration remained ‘British’ and in the hands of the inhabitants while conceding sovereignty.

  A major determinant in this apparent convergence towards a diplomatic solution was the economic and demographic decline of the Falklands community. In this context the final, impetuous Argentinian decision to launch a surprise invasion looks stupid, quite apart from being wrong. It is not inconceivable that political opposition on the Islands could simply have been bought out. Before the invasion, one farm manager reckoned that his farmhands would have left the Islands for £10,000.6 It seems that had they actually been offered this amount by Buenos Aires—or £20,000 or £50,000—most of the locally-born Islanders would have willingly followed the trail to New Zealand and elsewhere, already taken by a third of the population (and an increasing proportion of the young) since 1945. At an infinitesimal fraction of the eventual human and economic cost of the war, a combination of local self-government and generous compensation for emigration could have peacefully removed Britain’s ‘social base’ from the Falklands.

  Instead, the Junta ordered an invasion. After the takeover, play was made in the British press about how the islanders had been forced to drive on the right instead of the left, and how those who refused to submit to this instruction bravely created bottlenecks for Argentinian troopcarriers. There are twelve miles of metalled road on the Falklands. The Junta instructed its forces to ‘respect’ the inhabitants. None of them or the small British garrison were killed in the invasion. On the day of the takeover, Galtieri stated that there would be ‘no disruption’ in the lives of the islanders. He also asked for an ‘honourable agreement’ with the UK.7 After the British reconquest, it was reported that Port Stanley was ‘in much better shape than one might have expected’. Many untended homes had not been vandalized. The local people had been ‘largely ignored’ by the invaders.8 Snobbish to the end, the Junta had treated the inhabitants with the velvet glove traditionally applied to its country’s privileged European settlements, rather than the brutal knuckleduster applied to the workers of Cordoba or the Indians in Tucuman province.

  Against this, the line which Thatcher took was that British people were being subjected to intolerable oppression. In one interview she claimed that the islanders had been having a ‘marvellous life�
� until they were invaded by thousands of soldiers of ‘an alien creed’.9 The implication was that the Junta was trying to take over the people and reduce them to the oppressed status of its own citizenry. A similar argument was pursued by Noel Annan in his apologia for Thatcher in the New York Review of Books.10 Somehow or other it seems that if we are not willing to countenance the use of war to free the Falklanders from their plight, then we have not learnt the lessons of the fate of the Jews in central Europe.

  Only one aspect of this argument, if it can be so described, is potentially valid. The Junta are a lying and murderous lot who cannot be trusted. If a Falklander wanted to speak out against their methods or to demand parliamentary democracy in Buenos Aires, he or she could have been summarily rounded up. Thus it was right to demand that Argentina’s forces be withdrawn and that independent protection of the islanders’ civil rights be ensured. Sovereignty should have been ceded to Argentina, not for the nationalist reasons that it has advanced, but for the practical ones British officials of left and right had already deemed sensible (I will return to this issue in Chapter 7). At the same time the local government of those who desired to stay should have remained in their own hands. Given the Junta’s basically pro-British feelings and their desire for an ‘honourable’ agreement, such an arrangement was not implausible, even without the use of economic sanctions.

  However, even if we suppose the ridiculous and presume that the Junta really wanted to devour the souls of the islanders with its ‘alien creed’, would it then have been proper to use force? The answer is surely ‘no’ for at least two reasons. First, the territory of the Falklands should belong to Argentina anyway. Second, the numbers involved make such a proposition absurd. This is not accidental. As I also argue in Chapter 7, the tiny number of Falklanders makes any idea of their own political independence ‘bloody ridiculous’, to use the formulation of Harry Milne, the Stanley manager of the Falkland Islands Company.11 So too the dispatch of the task force. The costs of the expedition have not yet been totted up but on the British side alone they will probably total between £1.5 and £2 billion. Every single local-born Falklander, man, woman and even child, could have been given compensation of £100,000 each and £10,000 a year per head for twenty years, and the costs would have been less than a tenth of the war and the projected cost of a garrison, leaving aside the grave loss of life. Money not arms was the solution.