It is necessary to leave the squabble in Labour’s ranks to return to the less elastic mentality of the Conservative MPs. Michael Foot was followed in the debate by Edward du Cann, a great oak in the Tory bramble patch. As I’ve already noted, he immediately thanked Foot (one almost writes ‘Sir Michael’) for the way he ‘spoke for us all’. The issue was straightforward, du Cann continued:
Let us declare and resolve that our duty now is to repossess our possessions and to rescue our own people. [Note the order.] Our right to the Falkland Islands is undoubted. Our sovereignty is unimpeachable. British interest in that part of the world, in my judgement, is substantial. It is substantial in the Falklands Islands, however trivial the figures may appear to be. It is substantial in the sea, which has yet to yield up its treasures. It is also substantial in Antarctica. (My emphasis.)
Is that why our boys have gone to die? To protect our treasures in the Antarctic bleakness? Our companies will be able to yield it up. They will not be subject to our domestic rates of taxation, for it is a long way to the South Atlantic and we must be reasonable. Nonetheless, ‘we’ will be able to invest the profits abroad where they can earn ‘us’ the best rate of return. Thatcher’s government is particularly splendid in this respect. For example, in the first two years of her administration, the outflow of capital after she lifted all exchange controls, came to £8,600,000,000. That is a substantial British interest deposited overseas. How could these, ‘our’ possessions, be safe, if we did not fight for them when necessary? Du Cann continued on another note:
In the United Kingdom, we must accept reality. For all our alliances and for all the social politenesses which the diplomats so often mistake for trust, in the end in life it is self-reliance and only self-reliance that counts …. We have one duty only, which we owe to ourselves—the duty to rescue our people and to uphold our rights. Let that be the unanimous and clear resolve of the House this day. Let us hear no more about logistics—how difficult it is to travel long distances. I do not remember the Duke of Wellington whining about Torres Vedras. (Honourable Members: ‘Hear, hear’.) We have nothing to lose now except our honour. [Oh yes, and those substantial interests mentioned earlier.]
With the exception of my impertinent parenthesis, that was how du Cann concluded his historic intervention, adding that he was sure the nation’s honour ‘was safe in the hands of my honourable friend’, a reference to Thatcher, both accolade and threat. It is ironic to compare the ravings of du Cann with the available thoughts of Mao Tse-tung. Self-reliance is one common theme. Voluntarism is another, Mao’s attitude to moving mountains was similar to du Cann’s on distance. Equally, for Mao ‘every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”’. For du Cann, it seems, Mao’s reality is one the United Kingdom must accept.
This Chinese parallel may seem far fetched, yet it recurs. In its post-victory editorial, for example, the Economist celebrated the Falklands War because ‘Britain has long needed its own sort of cultural revolution’.17 This ideological uplift is badly needed in the UK and America, it goes on to argue, because those under fifty regard military values as a bit of a joke. The Cultural Revolution itself, of course, initially placed the People’s Army and its barracks version of Maoism in command of Chinese civilian life. A world away from Thatcherism, but is it accidental that the civilizations of countries that were once great empires and are now second-rank powers should foster similar longings?
Du Cann was followed by Enoch Powell. Powell was a monetarist before monetarism, a man of race before the race question. He was dismissed from the Conservative front bench by Heath, he left the Tory Party over the Common Market, and he now represents a Northern Ireland seat as a Unionist MP. He holds Margaret Thatcher in his thrall. Powell began on an Ulster note. He demanded that proposals concerning the future of Northern Ireland, that were going to be presented to the Commons on the Monday, should be withdrawn. He regarded the Irish policy under development as designed to detach the North from the UK, in collusion with the southern Republic. Although his request was not echoed subsequently, the issue certainly explains part of the Tory venom over the Falklands. For after more than a decade of wearisome fighting and huge expense, Powell feared that London was beginning to consider the abandonment of Ulster. There too, a majority of the population wishes to remain ‘British’. As every politican and journalist who has listened to Ian Paisley knows, those who follow his Orangeman’s pipe and drum are Irish. Yet the Protestant Irish say they are British, and they fly the Union Jack with a fervid passion that can only be found in such places as Gibraltar and … the Falklands. Hence a central aspect of British politics is associated with the ‘right’ of the Falklanders to stay governed by the Crown. They do not seek self-determination and their land is claimed by another state—Argentina—just as the Irish Republic claims the North. Give way in the South Atlantic, and the position of the Ulstermen becomes more precarious. The integrity of the nation itself—the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—might be threatened. Thus on the British side the Falklands War had an Orange pigmentation that the rest of the world largely failed to perceive.
Powell went on to demand the court martial of the handful of Royal Marines who surrendered to the larger Argentine invasion force the previous day, because the Secretary of State for Defence had commented in an interview that ‘no British soldier ever surrenders’. Evidently, therefore, they had disobeyed orders and brought ‘infamy to this country’. (Both he and the Secretary seemed to have forgotten Singapore.) Fortunately, Powell’s amnesia was only partial. He was able to pluck out of his memory the wonderful coincidence that the ‘Invincible’ was the name of the capital ship in the British naval force that sank Von Spee’s flotilla in a famous battle off the Falklands in December 1914. This was the example the Government should follow:
There is only one reaction which is fit to meet unprovoked aggression upon one’s own sovereign territory: that is direct and unqualified and immediate willingness—not merely willingness, but willingness expressed by action—to use force. The Government have set in train measures which will enable them to do that; but there must be nothing which casts doubt upon their will and their intention to do it.
He then went on to emphasize that the country would now see whether Thatcher was indeed the ‘Iron Lady’.
Powell was followed by Sir Nigel Fisher, a pillar of centrist Tory orthodoxy. His intervention struck a marginally new note. He seemed to suggest that there was probably little the Government could do: ‘Britain has been humiliated. What can now be done? One’s natural instinct is to get the invaders out, but it is much easier said than done.’ Perhaps Argentina could be excluded from the World Cup. In Fisher’s view,
Whatever action is decided upon, this is a deeply depressing and distressing episode. We have failed—and failed lamentably—to defend the integrity of one of Britain’s few remaining colonies.
No expense should be spared for the Task Force. The only possible excuse for the Government was that Ministers did not know that the invasion was a ‘possibility’. Even that would not be very good. Fisher compared the Argentine fait accompli to the Nazi seizure of Norway in 1940. That, he pointed out, led to the fall of Chamberlain. It was quite a heavy number from a back-bencher with a handle to address to his own front-bench. One felt the call of his nostalgia: ‘one of the few remaining colonies’, as if this was a rare species the state had a duty to protect if only to prevent its extinction.
It was next the turn of Dr David Owen, who spoke for the new ‘mould-breakers’, the Social Democratic Party. The SDP was created to inject a European, bourgeois sense of proportion into the country’s politics, a rather radical ambition as one can see. On this issue however, the SDP was itself completely shaped by the received conventions. The past was too heavy for the SDP at the vital moment when it had an opportunity to break away from Westminster’s dormitory consciousness. Owen was Foreign Minister in Callaghan’s Labour Gover
nment, which had ‘saved’ the Falklands in 1977 through preemptive naval deployment. He generously told the House about his own heroic role. Furthermore, his constituency is Plymouth, whence Drake set out against the Spanish in 1588.
The Government have the right to ask both sides of the House for the fullest support in their resolve to return the Falkland Islands and the freedom of the islanders to British sovereignty.
Dr Owen cultivates his youthful looks and his open, non-ideological style. Perhaps imagining himself a new John Kennedy, he recommended a 200-mile naval blockade zone around the Falklands, and cited the precedent of the Cuban missile crisis. How apt. The Falklands should be repossessed and the SDP would support the Government in office to sustain this end, because servicemen’s lives ‘might be put at risk’. Tarn Dalyell rose and asked Owen to give way for a question. Owen refused, with an interesting response which shows that he knew he was silencing the voice of an opponent to the Task Force. ‘There is no question of anyone in the House weakening the stance of the Government’, Owen stated flatly. A wonderful thing, democracy. Dalyell rose again, but Owen ignored him and concluded, ‘The House must now resolve to sustain the Government in restoring the position.’ The Westminster SDP kept in with the mob.
Sir Julian Amery was then recognized by the Speaker, who so selected one of the more right-wing members of the House. For Amery, ‘The third naval power in the world, and the second in NATO, has suffered a humiliating defeat.’ With these opening words, he went on to attack the Foreign Office, particularly Lord Carrington, then the withdrawal from the naval base in Simonstown, South Africa, and next the run-down of the navy. He could not believe that the intelligence services had failed to detect the Argentine build-up. But:
We have lost a battle, but have not lost the war. It is the old saying that Britain always wins the last battle. [Suez, for example?] ‘I seek … two simple assurances. The first is that we are determined to make the Argentine dictator disgorge what he has taken—by diplomacy if possible, by force if necessary … nothing else will restore the credibility of the Government or wipeth stain from Britain’s honour.
The Biblical archaism stiffened credibility all round. Britain will wipeth last.
A Labour voice was heard. He too had been involved in the 1977 action when his Government saved the Falklands. Furthermore, Ted Rowlands had a goddaughter in Port Stanley, who was there with her mother, in Argentinian hands. He had been involved with the islands ‘over many years’, and knew a lot about their people:
If the honourable lady [Thatcher] meets the islanders, which I hope she will do—and I hope we shall succeed in freeing them—she will find that they are passionate believers in parliamentary democracy. They listen to and watch everything that we say and do in the House. It is one of their most remarkable characteristics. Even the most obscure parliamentary question is followed and debated in the Falkland Islands.
What with that and looking after 600,000 sheep, it’s little wonder that most of them have remained laconic. But given how closely the Falklanders followed Hansard, how could the Government possibly have failed to follow the build-up of Argentinian intentions? Rowlands referred to his experience in office in 1977:
We found out that certain attitudes and approaches were being formed. I cannot believe that the quality of our intelligence has changed. Last night the Secretary of State for Defence asked, ‘How can we read the mind of the enemy?’ I shall make a disclosure. As well as trying to read the mind of the enemy, we have been reading its telegrams for many years.
Rowlands went on to relate how he had gone to Callaghan with information in 1977 and the then Prime Minister (and not David Owen?) had instructed the covert dispatch of a naval force. Now it was essential to restore the rights of the Falklanders ‘as urgently as possible’. If the Government Ministers cannot do this, ‘they should go’.
The islanders have already paid a high price for the initial set of blunders. They have lost their freedom for the first time in 150 years. The guilty men should not go scot free if we do not retrieve the islands as quickly as possible.
In Parliamentary terms, the pressure of this argument was very strong. It gave the Government no room for manoeuvre. ‘We saved it, you have lost it, either you get it back or get out.’ Had it been unemployment that was being debated, the rhetoric would be regarded as dull—run-of-the-mill verbiage that could be ignored if anyone bothered to listen. But it was the nation’s honour that was at stake, in a contest in which each party seeks to represent the Nation, at the expense of the other.
Patrick Cormack followed, a representative of Tory sagacity at its deepest. Michael Foot was great, ‘for once he truly spoke for Britain’. So too did Dr Owen. This should give ‘fortification’ to the Prime Minister.
But what a blunder, what a monumental folly, that the Falkland Islanders should be incarcerated in an Argentine goal …. It was not right that the Foreign Secretary should have been absent from the United Kingdom during this week …. These things must be said because we are talking about redeeming a situation. We are talking about restoring credibility. That is restoring the credibility not merely of a set of politicians and of a Government, but of our nation. We must all be determined to do that. [My emphasis.] … This is one of the most critical moments in the history of our country since the war …. I should think that there will be some anxious people in Gibraltar today. (An Honourable Member: ‘And in Hong Kong’.) There will also be anxious people in Hong Kong…. Therefore, our united resolve from today must be to utilize the unanimity that has been expressed in the debate.
Unless the Government did so utilize this unanimity Cormack warned, he would leave the Tory benches.
Arthur Bottomley was selected next from Labour. Would he finally staunch the flow of gibberish from the other side? No. He simply asked the Prime Minister a brief question: would she assure our friends ‘that so long as the Falkland Islands and their inhabitants wish to remain in the Commonwealth, Britain will see that they do so?’ Eh? It seems that Bottomley’s national-internationalism had not yet caught up with the UN and that he still believes in the Commonwealth. It was its only mention as an institution. But then Bottomley was Colonial Secretary when the Smith Junta seized power in Rhodesia ….
Bottomley was followed by a Conservative, Raymond Whitney, who was interrupted six times in ten minutes by formal questions and was subjected throughout to an intense and furious barrage of heckling and disruption from his own side of the gangway. Whitney had worked in Argentina for the Foreign Office during the early seventies, and thus knew something about the matter. This was intolerable. ‘The Foreign Office was not working for Britain’, said the first interjector, Teddy Taylor. The sixth and last objected intensely to Whitney’s suggestion that ‘there are alternative ways in which the interests of the Falklands Islanders can be protected and I feel that these can be achieved by negotiation.’ Sir John Biggs-Davison of Epping Forest was beside himself, and interupted on a point of order: ‘If defeatism of this kind is to be spoken, should it not be done in secret session? Would it be in order to spy strangers?’ (Had the ‘Honourable’ member so ‘spied’, the Speaker would have had to ask visitors to leave the galleries.) Over the howls and caterwauls, Whitney retorted: ‘it is not a question of defeatism—it is a question of realism and the avoidance of another humiliation for our country.’
This was the only point in the whole debate when the interests of the islanders as people were directly addressed. The reality was unbearable. For the House they were symbols of British pride; of the country’s holy freedoms (to be unemployed, to love the Queen, but not to vote); of democracy; of sovereignty. Whitney pleaded with the collective wisdom of the Commons: could it not consider the consequences of war carefully? Would not the implications of a successful landing mean a military presence for years?
I earnestly implore the House to think very carefully, so that we make sure that we are ready to take and answer the challenges of the questions that are there. T
hey will not go away if they are not enunciated.
It was a brave but futile effort, like asking a cage of parrots to think before they speak.
The Foreign Affairs representative of the Liberal Party rose. Perhaps he, at least, would also bring some thought to the affair. He reprimanded Whitney, however, and told him: ‘This is without doubt a very shameful day for this country.’ In that he was correct, if not in the way he imagined. Russell Johnston (of Inverness) then quoted from an editorial in the Guardian, which stated, ‘the Falkland Islands do not represent any strategic or commercial British interest worth fighting over (unless one believes reports of crude oil under its off-shore waters.)’ It was an odd assertion, playing the issue on both sides of the street and thus failing to keep even to the middle of the road. Exactly how much oil would be ‘worth’ fighting for, and exactly how many dead would make it worthwhile, and to whom, are questions that could fill pages with evasive answers. Johnston was clever to upbraid it. It allowed him to score a cheap point and proclaim that it was the ‘rights and freedoms of individual people’ that mattered. He was ‘depressed’ and ‘angry’ to see photographs of Galtieri looking pleased. Johnston then told the House how he was a member of the Falkland Islands Association. He had followed the issue and knew that government after government had starved the place of funds. Now ‘vast amounts of money will have to be spent’. ‘If we are to act at all, we must act swiftly.’
Iron Britannia Page 9
