Iron Britannia
Time to Take the Great out of Britain
ANTHONY BARNETT
Judith
For Eleanor Herrin and Tamara Deutscher, who made me see that it was not a comic expedition
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction to the 2012 Edition
Epigraph
Preface to the First Edition
Chronology
1 Glare of War
2 The Crackpot Parliament
3 Churchillism
4 Thatcherism
5 Pastoralism and Expatriotism
6 A War in the Third World
7 A Just Settlement?
8 The Logic of Sovereignty
Appendix: Thatcher Unexpurgated
Further Articles
Copyright
Introduction to the New Edition
Iron Britannia in 2012
Miss Roberts was very fervent in her determination to stand by the Empire. It was the most important community of peoples that the world had ever known. It was so bound with loyalty that it brought people half way across the world to help each other in times of stress. The Empire must never be liquidated.
An account of the first known speech by Margaret Thatcher, 25 June 1945, at a general election hustings in Sleaford, Lincolnshire.1
It is the New Year. Preparing a new edition of my Iron Britannia, I sit and re-read this book written half a lifetime ago, and I am shocked. Having expected to write a brief, ironic introduction on the thirtieth anniversary of a past polemic, mainly to help those young enough to have no recollection of the Falklands War, I am instead appalled at how relevant the book has once again become.*
The cause of my astonishment is not only that the issue of the Falklands is resurfacing, if that is the right word. Now that massive oil reservoirs under the seabed have apparently been confirmed, the islanders (being so few) are tagged to become per capita the richest people on earth. Where there is oil there is conflict, and as Argentina asks for a ‘dialogue’ over the resources, the tropes of old attitudes revive, instincts are stirred and the UK responds with warlike postures.
The focus of Iron Britannia is on the short period between April and June 1982, the weeks when its first draft was written. I believe that moment revealed the underlying mental universe of British politics, exposed by the magnificent Iron Lady. After Argentina seized two islands the size of Wales, 290 miles from its coast and with less than two thousand souls upon them, a Task Force of more than a hundred ships and over twenty-five thousand men headed 8,000 miles into the South Atlantic to win back a place almost none of us here had heard of, that in no previous sense ‘belonged to us’, and were inhabited by a few hundred poor islanders who could easily have been offered munificent compensation by the UK government for its failure to defend them.
As it was, over ten thousand British soldiers were landed. Supported by naval artillery and US satellite intelligence they fought to the death with more than thirteen thousand Argentinian conscripts, on almost uninhabited rocks. How could this have happened with the support of all the political parties and no serious opposition? Many merely blamed (or praised) the determination of Margaret Thatcher. Yet there was clearly more to it. An enraged House of Commons and a howling media were bellowing for a fight as she announced that the Navy would set sail. There had to be something in the water here in Britain (and therefore in my waters too) for the whole country to willingly risk the sacrifice of hundreds of young men and the crippling of many more, the devastation of their families, the even larger number of likely enemy casualties, the staggering costs, and the possibility of a military catastrophe, to embrace with such enthusiasm a war for nowhere.
The war was unexpected and the victory a nice surprise (‘We weren’t sure we had it in us’). But what was then revelation has now become expectation. The Falklands War is not, as I hoped it would be, merely an exhibit of how we were. It is the starting point for what we have become. The victory did not just ensure a decade of Thatcher’s direct hegemony, impressive enough though that was. It has inspired what can be called a Falklands Syndrome.
This Falklands Syndrome means two things. First, our rulers feel entitled to demonstrate military superiority whenever possible. (The sub-text is that they believe such a demonstration will enhance their popularity, renew their personal can-do spirit for application to domestic matters, and elevate their standing abroad. While it helps to know that the war can be easily justified, it is the urge to win against the odds that matters.) Second, any defeat or setback vindicates the need for the Falklands Syndrome, not its mistaken nature. It is a classic case of an irrefutable mindset, sanctified by frustration as much as it is vindicated by victory.
After he became Prime Minister, Tony Blair turned the Falklands Syndrome into what he pretentiously described as his ‘Chicago Doctrine’.2 He later defined it as a call to be ‘bold, adventurous even’ in considering the need to intervene by force. The influence of his ‘doctrine’ survives Iraq and is being toughened by the experience of our soldiers and their high losses in Helmand. Both may be defeats but this can never defeat the need to be ‘bold’; on the contrary, you can feel the back stiffen, the voice raised to a higher pitch of conviction. Pioneered by the Falklands, the long-range exercise of high-tech military power, justified by the proclamation of principles rather than the need to defend oneself, has come to mark the post-Cold War world.
When Iron Britannia was written, the Falklands campaign appeared to be a colonial throwback, sending forth a show of force, all flags flying, to a remote, watery corner of the planet, and a nostalgic re-enactment of the Second World War. The larger part of my shock when I re-read Iron Britannia was the realisation that the throwback was in fact a harbinger: three decades ago the Falklands War welcomed us to the future. And now, looking back, I begin to see how it was done.
The Task Force of 1982, far from being old-fashioned, became a model for modern interventions, from Kuwait in 1991 to Afghanistan; and also, to the delight of the arms industry, a test-bed for high-tech conflict.3 At home, the Falklands Syndrome inspired New Labour even more than the Tories to seek military forms of popularity and renew the country’s martial spirit. Unless it is stopped, the Falklands Syndrome will infect or, if you must, inspire a fourth decade.
For as we know, the Falklands Syndrome can win elections and shape British politics. We can see its potential to do so more clearly now than, say, ten years ago because the combined impact of the 2008 financial crash and its economic consequences, alongside defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, are exposing once again the foundations of Britain’s peculiar political culture, which is the main focus of Iron Britannia.
Once again, we confront the same toxic mixture – of economic failure, high unemployment, the threat of permanent ‘decline’, a defiant national sense of self-worth, and a pathological ache for global influence – which marked the seventies in Britain. Yet again, a backbench and media chorus is preparing us to seek strength through leadership, in the belief that the example of the Falklands is the best way to renew ourselves in a crisis. Once more, the legend re-emerges in the South Atlantic of a defiant underdog who deserves to influence the world.
I attempted to demystify this marvel at the start of the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher seemed to become both a reincarnation of Boadicea and our Roman Emperor at one and the same time. Our government and media are not just looking back to the spirit of that moment on its thirtieth anniversary: they would love to repeat it if they can. So I have turned this introduction in large part into a warning. Don’t think of the Falklands as an exception, as I did. Contemplate what happened thirty years ago as the norm. Look out for the preparations to do it again.
The current generation of Britain’s political leaders are half the age of Margaret Thatcher. Their memory of the Falklands campaign is as adolescent as Thatcher’s was of Hitler. Apparently unable to propose an alternative patriotism, they have become offspring of the Falklands Syndrome – the remade form of global Britishness that condemns to inner deterioration that which it succeeds in renovating by the injection of ‘greatness’ – and have adopted militarism in insidious forms.
Principles or Fantasies?
In 1982, as soon as the Buenos Aires Junta seized ‘Las Malvinas’, as the Falklands are called in Latin America, it was obvious that the British government had screwed up. Clearly the UK should not have held on to, and then left undefended, islands so remote from us and so close to Argentina; a country whose own claim to them was generally recognised around the world, even by our own sensible diplomats. Certainly Britain should not have done so while hiding behind the ‘wishes’ of the occupants of what was barely more than a company settlement, in a way that provoked and gave a pretext to an unstable dictatorship in Argentina. In such circumstances, to retain control of the place but not defend it was reprehensible – a posture Thatcher herself had personally insisted on and which made her culpable of having failed to protect the dependency. While no one doubted the Junta’s resort to force was a crime in international law and a despicable manoeuvre to gain domestic popularity, everyone in British political circles, above all Thatcher herself, knew that she would carry the can if the Falklands were ‘lost’.
When the Junta seized the islands, however, the sole casualty was a single Argentinian soldier, killed as some of the sixty-nine Royal Marines in situ resisted before they were overwhelmed. The few hundred Falkland families should therefore have been massively compensated – and offered domicile anywhere in the United Kingdom if they did not wish to stay under Latin rule. We had messed up on their wishes but we had an obligation to protect their interests (the distinction is important and I’ll return to it). The defeat was a humiliation for Britain, although not our first. We should have faced up to it, asking ourselves ‘What are its causes and how do we cure them?’
Hold on, new readers may be thinking – even if our politicians deserve little but scorn, what about the innocent islanders themselves, who are not sheep or squid and did not want to live under a torturing Junta? Don’t they deserve to be protected, and now just as in 1982, so they can live in their chosen home?
It was never a war for this principle. For pride, yes; but that takes us into self-perception and what kind of a country we are, which is what I set out to examine. As for principles, such as the right of the islanders to self-determination, these are important. I address them at some length in the book and will return to them later in this introduction, as they have emerged in an altered form. But humans only die for a principle with reluctance and as a last resort. In 1982 the world saw a United Kingdom that was priapic for a battle.
Also, the idea that the principle of the self-determination of the Falklands mattered to those who decided on the war was manifestly implausible. They talked about the islanders ‘being British’ but not about their human reality. I estimated there were about six hundred families settled across the islands, and this proved accurate: ‘There were in total 589 residential buildings in the islands, 363 of them in Stanley.’4 In the 1970s, at the behest of the United States, we had forcibly removed about the same number of British dependents from their homes in the island of Diego Garcia and dumped them on another country, offering the host government £650,000 in costs and the people nothing at all. It was a far more brutal fate than anything that would have befallen the Falklanders if their islands had been taken over by the cravenly snobbish and anglophile Junta, keen to make a good impression on world opinion after its unprovoked use of force. Just days before the Argentine invasion in 1982 the British finally agreed to give the people of Diego Garcia £4 million. Was there a whisper of support for their right to self-determination? Of course not. But then they were not ‘from British stock’ as Thatcher winsomely put it. Among the established commentators only Peregrine Worsthorne had the languorous self-confidence to make the point in public as the Task Force braved the oceans: we would never have gone to such trouble had the Falkland Islanders been black or brown.5 No one gainsaid him. So much for principle.
As my friend Fred Halliday said in a conversation, the talk in Britain was as if the Nazis had invaded Ambridge.6 Laugh? One has to laugh. But no one else around the world has any idea what the joke means. We were indulging in a national fantasy. Where did it come from, and why was it so strong that it would take us to war?
Like many, I listened to the radio-broadcast House of Commons debate on Saturday 3 April (discussed at the start of Iron Britannia) which began the war on the British side as the dispatch of the Task Force was announced. I thought the MPs were in a time-warp, as they acted out an incongruous dance of bygone sovereignty. I didn’t think there would really be a war. I thought it was a joke.
It’s War
Then, a month later, on 2 May 1982, they sank the Belgrano.
The moment I heard the Belgrano had been torpedoed I thought of Eleanor Herrin. When I had ridiculed Parliament’s jingoism Eleanor had shaken at her head at my gullibility. I felt a need to rectify my shallow misjudgement. Her husband, the father of my partner Judith, was in command of a Lancaster bomber when it went down over Germany, near Cologne in 1943. If I write with feeling about the families of those who are killed, it is because I have witnessed the loss so closely that it has become a shared experience – the terrible charge on loved ones of the life-long impact of the missing. Did Eleanor suffer and Philip Herrin die for this ludicrous parliamentary huffing and puffing? Would more families now have to endure the loss that goes on for ever, for the want of compensating the islanders and in order – for so it seemed – to keep Thatcher in office? These MPs, dribbling righteousness, were laying claim to patriotism and values of the war against fascism, were they? Right then, we had better see about that. This is my country too.
Such was my mood as I set about going through the Commons debate, line by line, with the knowledge that hundreds would die because of these speeches. Before my eyes a mountain range emerged, one that shapes the entire landscape of British politics, including my own. I call it Churchillism.
I use the present tense. What Britain really needed then, at the start of the eighties, was to shed the influence of Churchillism. Instead, the Falklands fixed it – one could almost say fixated it – into the system. It looms over us still, even if its craggy features are eroded and crumbling.
My analysis of it at the time was swift and spontaneous. It needs to be strengthened, not least thanks to David Edgerton’s authoritative history of the ‘warfare state’ that accompanied the welfare state. I had accepted the myth that we fought the Second World War from the outset as the weaker power to Nazi Germany. In fact, as Edgerton shows, the British Empire was the stronger, and we went to war in 1939 confident of victory. This certainly changes the way I’d write my chapter today, but not decisively. For I would argue that the myth of being defiant and alone in 1940 was the shared experience – part of the structure of feeling o
f what it meant to be British – in 1982.
May 1940 saw the birth of Britain, as we know it. Every variety of British patriotism goes back to it, and was formed or reformed then. All the now growing national patriotisms currently within Britain – Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish within the northern six counties – must, if they are to last, take their own measure of the moment that shaped the modern British union. The simple way to describe what happened under the forge of that war (which makes it so different from 1914–18) was that it saw the transformation of the world’s wealthiest and most extensive empire into a European nation state: from the British Empire to Britain. In a brilliant passage Edgerton identifies the all-important rhetorical shift from the imperial ‘we’ to the national ‘we’ in Churchill’s speeches. In 1940 it was the British Empire that found itself alone; in the 1945 general election it was Britain that stood alone.7
This was not just a transition imposed from outside by the United States and our reduced circumstances: many organised for it from within, especially the Labour movement. In 1939, its leader, Clement Attlee declared his party’s support for the declaration of war explaining that democracy was an ‘ethical principle’ for Labour:
we believe that every individual should be afforded the fullest opportunity for developing his or her personality … The German workers have lost all their democratic rights. Wherever Nazism is, there is cruelty, tyranny and the rule of the secret police …
Later, when he took Labour into coalition under Churchill, he told his party,
We have to stand today for the souls in prison in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, yes, and in Germany … Life without liberty is not worth living. Let us go forward and win …
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