Iron Britannia

by Anthony Barnett

  3,500–3,999 5

  4,000–4,499 8

  4,500–4,999 1

  Over 5,000 12

  Total Number 914

  Total Income £1,173,905

  Average Income £1,284

  The exact population of the Falklands was not known in 1982, but the 1980 census showed 1,813 residents of whom 302 were born in Britain. The 914 incomes listed seem to include some of those of the temporary or posted residents working in the Falklands for some years. It can be assumed that these would lie in the higher income brackets; almost certainly, the 600 incomes below £2,000 a year went to Kelper families. The Report states (p. 81):

  Most native born islanders of what they themselves call ‘the working class’ live in conditions of dependence, which are attractive in immediate and material terms but which offer no encouragement for engagement in economic, social or political development, since scarcely any of them have a stake in the place. This applies as much at the collective as at the individual level. Apart from the right to vote for the small group of people who make up the Legislative Council (dominated, at least numerically, by farm owners and managers) they have no real opportunity to influence decisions on public affairs…. It is clear that the distinctly low educational standards in the Islands leave locally taught people at a disadvantage in dealing with farm managers/owners and UK recruited persons, heightening the sense of dependence and relative inferiority.

  This general condition worried the Shackleton team, which realized that community values had to be ‘stimulated’, especially among locally born people, for there to be any sustained economic development of the Falklands. These people had important qualities:

  They include honesty, versatility, physical hardiness and a capacity for sustained effort. Yet there appear to be other less encouraging features, such as a lack of confidence and enterprise at the individual and community level, and a degree of acceptance of their situation which verges on apathy, (p. 74)

  Various social factors reinforce this unsatisfactory situation. Because of the remoteness of the communities and the difficult terrain, there is little interaction between isolated settlements or even between the different groups within Port Stanley. In some country areas, ‘the quality of life is distinctly low’ (p. 79). This is made worse by the fact that, ‘the sex structure of the population is remarkable for its lack of females’ (p. 15). One consequence is a high rate of marital instability. In the outlying settlements,

  It is common for ‘the big house’ to have the only voice contact with the outside world (usually by radio telephone). In these cases the farm workers must approach the manager or owner in any situation however personal, requiring early action from beyond the settlement, e.g. in regard to medical advice.

  The result is that,

  Although the attitude of most managers/owners is certainly benevolent, it may also be described as paternalistic. (Indeed, more than one manager told us that it might sometimes appear feudal.) (p. 76)

  It is therefore not surprising that young people especially have been leaving the Falklands, ‘in search of a greater degree of personal freedom’ (p. 77). What future could they look forward to?

  Indeed, the situation as regards community spirit and cohesion was perhaps well put to us by one resident when he said simply, ‘There is no glue’ (p. 80).

  It will be remembered that in the debate on the Falklands of April 3, Thatcher said, ‘The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race. Their way of life is British….’ And Michael Foot thundered back: ‘The people of the Falkland Islands have the absolute right to look to us at this moment of their desperate plight.’ After glancing at the official report of their situation, one wonders whether this should not have been said with equal fervour before, rather than after, Argentina’s invasion.

  Members of Parliament, however, seek to protect Britain’s standing in the world, clearly a more pressing duty than spending one new pence worth of concern on conditions in the colonies. So it is not surprising that a part-owner of a Falkland farm stated: ‘Most of the people on the islands believe that under the Argentine flag the islands can be developed and improved.’8 Indeed, under the headline ‘Sheep shearer changes sides’, we were told about one Kelper who took out Argentinian nationality. According to his girl friend, ‘He wanted Argentina to have the islands because life there is so boring.’9 Argentina did indeed provide more excitement, for it seems he was jailed soon after its defeat.

  If Britain was fighting for the ‘freedom’ of the islanders, what was the power structure of the Falklands? The colony was ruled by a Governor appointed by Britain. He was advised by a ‘Legislative Council’ of eight, six of whom were elected by the islanders (the other two were ex officio). But the real ruling ‘body’ seems to have been an Executive Council in which not even the Legislative Council had a majority. Of the six on the Executive body, two were the Governor’s appointments, two ex officio and the other two came from the Legislative Council. The Falklands did not have democratic government by any stretch of the imagination at the ruling level. There has been some attempt at ‘popular’ improvement. Being a British community it has a trade union and once saw a strike for higher agricultural wages. (Could this mean that the Kelpers are stubbornly set in their old-fashioned practices—like the train drivers?) At any rate, political representation made little headway. The Stanley Town Council, which Shackleton describes as ‘one of the very few potential counter-weights to government’ (p. 74) was, alas, ‘abolished a few years ago’ (p. 81). We are not told by whom, but perhaps its demise was connected with the fact that a ‘National Progressive Party’ on the islands proved to have ‘only a brief life’. It seems probable that efforts to initiate a genuine autonomous polity foundered on the company’s stranglehold and the Falklands’ economic decline, accompanied by the demographic drain of its youth. Today, much of the actual Kelper population of Stanley consists of retired people who, after a lifetime of labour in the ‘camp’ (the local term for the countryside, from the Spanish campo), invest their savings in a clapboard house.

  As for the Falkland Islands Company itself, it was taken over by a subsidiary of the asset-stripping specialists Slater Walker, in 1972, and duly stripped of its assets. It was then sold to Charringtons, which was acquired by Coalite in 1977; its turnover currently represents 2% of Coalite’s business. According to one discussion of the Falklands crisis, ‘no islanders are now represented as either shareholders or directors of the company that now controls the FIC. Indeed, on 26 February 1982, just over a month before the war, the FIC decided at an extraordinary meeting that it would cease to be a publicly listed company, and thus is no longer obliged to publish even its basic information about the Islands’ economy.’10

  Of course, the Kelpers do have their ‘Britishness’. Shackleton notes, ‘the most striking example of solidarity has been the common feeling on the sovereignty issue.’ In a society of remarkable apathy, one which ‘has no glue’, where managers describe their relations with their labourers as ‘feudal’, and which is kept together by the Company’s interests—the only thing it seems to have is extra-hemispheric loyalty. ‘They have been loyal to us. We must be loyal to them’,11 Thatcher insisted. Yet their national life is as empty of content as the Royal Wedding mugs placed loyally upon their dressers. Thatcher, who has destroyed community upon community in Britain itself has decided that the Kelper’s way of life must be preserved at all costs. The Tory talk of saving the Falklands and ‘restoring’ its freedom is little more than a cruel manipulation of the pathetic dreams of a community long despised by London.

  When their ‘liberation’ was complete, the stalwart messages of thanks and the kisses for the soldiers seen on television appeared to come from the farm managers and outside (British) nurses. When the surrender was announced, what ‘should have been a moment for jubilation’ was met merely with ‘enigmatic reserve’ by the Kelpers themselves.

  At times it was hard
to believe that they (the Falklanders) had any connection with the war. They behaved, it sometimes appeared, like peasants caught in an eighteenth century European dynastic clash—getting on with their farming as best they could while the rival armies swarmed around them.12

  Could this have been because, indeed, they did not have any real connection to the causes of the war, and that the conflict was nothing more than a clash of sovereignty? Perish the thought! Yet another reporter observed the same phenomenon:

  The islanders never seemed particularly glad to see us, although that could be put down to their natural reserve and shyness with strangers … More often than not they went about their daily lives as if the troops swarming around them did not exist.13

  At last, however, ‘there seems little doubt that change is imminent’, The Times reporter noted; a garrison is being considered which will ‘treble the population of the Falklands and put civilians in a minority’. And so the islanders are coming to realize, ‘that they are still an occupied people, albeit this time occupied by their own forces’. Not unnaturally, ‘bitter words (are) being exchanged between locals and soldiers’.14

  Perhaps not so many words. The sceptical passivity of the islanders and their apparent lack of enthusiasm in their new situation may be measured perhaps by the first town meeting to take place in Stanley after its ‘liberation’. It did not receive much attention in the British press. But Time magazine reported that the organizer said he was ‘disappointed’ at the attendance, while in addition, ‘Although it lasted for two hours, most of the 100 townspeople who turned out were silent…’.15 Simon Winchester found a similar attitude; hatred of Argentina after the invasion is now compounded by bitterness towards the British,

  Their attitude towards the British is a mixture of continued deep mistrust, disappointment and a sullen acceptance of the military realities of the new occupying army amongst them. Six weeks since liberation, and the Falklands people—as distinct from the Falklands establishment—are profoundly unhappy.

  Few other journalists got beyond the press handouts to even see the distinction, let alone report it.16

  I noted earlier the reports that the islanders were mostly left alone by Argentina’s garrison. Why then should the British forces seem like occupying troops? Buried away, there were disturbing reports. The BBC’s correspondent, Robin Fox, delivered some of the most fulsome panegyrics to the heroism of the ‘2 Para’. For example at Goose Green,

  The achievement of H. Jones and his men was heroism in battle on the scale of Leonidas and the men of Sparta at Themophylae…. As we crouched by the line of gorse bushes, the only landmark at that point, the unit seemed entirely cut off.17

  Yet even he felt obliged to add at the bottom of another of his articles in the Listener, something that was given little emphasis in the mass media.

  I cannot pretend these men are angels. In Port Stanley, when the tension of battle was over the amount of ‘proffing’ by British troops was considerable—some understandable, some not, such as the thieving of a collection of gold coins from a young vet who had just lost his wife in the final bombardment.18

  Perhaps because they were in the eye of the storm, many of the ‘slow’ and ill-educated Kelpers grasped what was happening long before the majority of the British public. Anthony Arblaster has described how the Kelper Jim Burgess was hustled away from the television camera by British officials when he stated that the islanders ‘think they are being used, and I’m inclined to agree’. That was before the task force had arrived in the South Atlantic. Arblaster goes on to condemn the British action and in particular to denounce the way the ‘rights of the islanders’ were used by Thatcher’s Government as ‘an ideological and moral camouflage’. It is difficult not to agree.19

  All the same, part of that camouflage was instinctive rather than deliberate falsification. Thatcher and Foot may genuinely believe that if the Falklanders want to be ruled by them, then that is a ‘liberation’. For the inhabitants of the UK this perhaps is the more serious problem. As Thatcher told the broadcaster Jimmy Young:

  I am only here in the capacity for which I am here this morning because our people have the right to self-determination. Just let’s get it right. This is what democracy is all about.

  Got it? ‘Our people have the right to self-determination.’ The word ‘our’ is ambiguous: in one sense it reaches out to include all Britons (‘We have self-determination’), but it also pulls sharply inwards to the possessive, as in a remark between two Lords (‘Our people are pretty slow off the mark, thank goodness’). To put it more empirically, it was widely noted that Cecil Parkinson MP, previously a figure of no public significance, was suddenly helicoptered into the War Cabinet and became its public spokesman, although he held no high office of state, and had only just been appointed by Thatcher as Chairman of the Conservative Party. But the composition of the British War cabinet itself received less scrutiny. If we leave aside the only occasional presence of the Attorney General, it seems that its participants were:

  Elected Persons Non-Elected Persons

  Thatcher (Prime Minister) Armstrong (PM’s Office)

  Pym (Foreign Affairs) Wade-Gray (Civil Service)

  Nott (Defence) Palliser (Civil Service)

  Whitelaw (Home Affairs) Havers (Head, Diplomatic Service)

  Parkinson (Conservative Party) Lewin (Chief, Defence staff)

  Clearly, some forms of self-determination are more determined than others.20 Even the informed public in the UK can have only the haziest knowledge of half ‘their’ officials who presided over the war, if they have ever heard of them at all.

  When the Tories and their supporting newspapers assert that the people of the Falklands Islands have been ‘liberated’, they mean to stand before the British electorate and say, ‘we are the liberators of Britons. Therefore, we are your liberators.’ The Falklanders themselves were merely the necessary cipher—all the more effective as a signifier for being as close to meaninglessness themselves as possible. The new language was nicely captured by a Sunday Telegraph post-Falklands editorial. It called for the ‘emancipation’ of workers from ‘trade-union exploitation’.21

  4. ‘Aggression Should Not Pay’

  This was the statement that carried most conviction. It was said with a righteousness of purpose, yet strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, it was also said with remarkable aggression. Various formulas were added before the landing and final assault on Port Stanley, such as ‘we would prefer the Argentines to go peacefully but …’. For many these were little more than a civilized decoration to a sentiment of gut, animal instinct. The latter was put with military succinctness by Sir Arthur Harris, Marshall of the RAF. Now aged 90 he was Chief of Bomber Command during World War Two. When the Vulcan bombers tried to hit the airstrip at Port Stanley, he appeared in full uniform bedecked with all his medals to tell reporters, ‘We can’t be kicked around without retaliating’.22 After victory, Cecil Parkinson explained, ‘To do our duty to our own people, and our duty to the whole civilized world, we have dispatched a Task Force of prodigious power’.23 And one can feel in this formula the way the British Government has made a virtue out of retaliation. It came as a relief that at last the UK could be aggressive.

  The issue produced one of the most fascinating tensions of the war. Its backers in the UK were bursting with delight at their conquests and were keen to pursue them with vigour during the conflict itself, yet had to appear in public as sober as a judge. This discrepancy allows for a more general reflection: history takes place in the demotic. In so far as decision makers are really the masters of events, they act and react in a vulgar and personal fashion. In so far as they make up their minds in discussion with close associates, these exchanges are livid with the crapulous feelings of those whose lives are dominated by the struggle for power. Yet even in confidential documents, let alone public speeches, their motives are presented in the finest prose they can achieve. Reasons of disinterest rather than self-interest are always f
oremost—in the public domain. On occasions in Parliament, a flicker of the actual drive behind the righteousness may be sensed. That is what made the 3 April debate so informative. One of the most forthright MPs did not speak then, however. Alan Clark is amongst the most hawkish of the war party on the Tory benches and undoubtedly activated the feverish violence amongst Conservatives after Argentina’s takeover. As the British Army was poised around Port Stanley, he told an interviewer that in his view the Falkland’s war,

  has enormously increased our world standing. You asked about world opinion—I mean, bugger world opinion—but our standing in the world has been totally altered by this. It has made every other member of NATO say ‘My God, the British are tough’.24

  That is how Thatcher wants it too. Her objective internationally, but also at home and not least in Parliament, is to be thoroughly intimidating. She told an American TV audience, ‘I have the reputation as the Iron Lady. I am of great resolve. That resolve is matched by the British people.’25 And those Britons who do not ‘match it’ had better watch out.

  On the international scene, this lesson hardly needs to be pondered. It was obvious that the British were able to push Argentina around because they had superior force. The response of one Brazilian opposition politican was to demand a crash programme for the construction of Brazilian nuclear weapons. Similarly South magazine, after noting that the Falklands War was a ‘godsend’ for Israel’, asked why the 1,800 Falklanders should merit such a ‘rescue’ operation while 750,000 West Bank Palestinians do not, and concluded ‘it is all a question of power in the end’. In private, those who sent the task force will agree, adding that what is also needed is that extra charismatic quality: will. The nerve to use force matters as much: one needs not only ‘clout’ but also ‘toughness’. The prodigious power of the task force from the civilized world, to use Parkinson’s description, was not engaged upon a civilizing mission. It taught Argentina a lesson; its pedagogy for Buenos Aires and for the rest of the world is ‘might is right’ and ‘have a spirit of iron’.