Iron Britannia

by Anthony Barnett

  At the same time in setting out Labour’s support for the war in this way he was clear about the decisive change that accompanied it,

  I think the majority of people in this country have now abandoned the old boastful imperialism … it was not so long ago in my own lifetime when our Press used to be filled with the same kind of arrogant boasting which one hears from Hitler … We must rid ourselves of any taint of imperialism.8

  Historically, a staggering conversion was compressed into seven years. A decisive victory took place but the entity that emerged victorious had changed its skin, sinew and body. By 1947, with India’s independence ordered by Attlee, Westminster’s ‘Imperial Parliament’ was no more and its King-Emperor was reduced to a mere common-or-garden King. A ‘British nation’ took to the stage. Of course, it would have more than a taint of imperialism about it as it clung to what colonies it could. But it was a country that emerged from a war that an Empire had declared.

  Britain and Churchillism – that ‘Great’ Feeling

  The question that has preoccupied its subject-citizens ever since is, ‘What kind of country are we?’ There are two things that need to be said about this as we look back to the crucial ‘moment’ of the Falklands, at a point nearly half way between 1945 and today.

  As is the case with any country, many different people, classes, regions and interests inhabit Britain. Just as diverse is the phenomenon of Churchillism that founded Britain (one that I define and whose components I analyse in Chapter 2). It was an exceptional collaboration of different traditions, drawn through the eye of 1940. The first generation of post-war leaders were unable to manage its legacy, leading to the enervating crisis of the seventies. Prime Minister Harold Wilson, confiding in the middle of the decade, ‘I have nothing new to offer’, summed up their uselessness.9 It wasn’t just the Prime Minister. The whole edifice of the Establishment and its consensus politics was morally broken. I was thinking of this when I wrote in 1982 that Churchillism condemned to a slow death the British state that it saved from catastrophe in May 1940, structurally disabling it for the future while ensuring that our rulers are obsessed with magical resurrection from the past.

  Thatcher conjured her solution to this decline in the starkest fashion: in terms of personal behaviour, the economy and the state. Denying her recipe was magic, she insisted there was ‘no alternative’. Many are still entranced, and believe as much. But there were alternatives, both within the Conservative Party and without. Others would have dealt with the crisis of the seventies differently and better. They were confounded and dispersed by Thatcher’s Falklands victory.10 It gave her an unrivalled capacity to lay claim to the mantle and legitimacy of Churchillism. But at the same time, by insisting on her claim in the way she did, she betrayed it. To take just three examples: her view that the Conservative supporters of consensus, not to speak of socialists, were ‘traitors’; her willingness to abolish municipal government; and her attempt to drive people from the electoral register with the Poll Tax,11 all demonstrated her tyrannical impulse. Thatcher assaulted the broad, inclusive nature of Churchillism – and in so doing set about destroying what Britain had once stood for in the war against fascism.

  This claim, while obvious to some, might seem controversial to others and could be puzzling if not incomprehensible to younger readers. So I will try to evoke what I mean as concisely as I can. Shortly before the Falklands, Edward Heath, who was Prime Minister from 1970–4 and whom Margaret Thatcher had defeated to become Tory leader, criticised both her economic policy of savage cuts and her assault on consensus. She was giving a special lecture in Australia and, immediately, she tacked her response onto it:

  To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no-one believes, but to which no-one objects … What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?12

  To which the answer is, ‘The Second World War.’ As applied by the Westminster Establishment, the ‘consensus politics’ that followed over the next thirty years did degenerate and needed to be replaced. But it could never have succeeded in the first place without its co-architects on the left, and their profound commitment to the principles and values of peace-loving, democratic patriotism.

  In ‘The Post War Dream’, the mournfully titled opening song of Pink Floyd’s magnificent response to Thatcher’s Falklands politics, The Final Cut (1983), Roger Waters asks, ‘Oh Maggie, Maggie what have we done?’ Waters’ father died at Anzio in Italy. Edward Heath, also a serving officer, could have appreciated the legitimacy of Waters’ claim to that post-war dream. Thatcher rejected it. She appropriated Churchillism, which in her hands became a narrow self-righteousness. That is why it is not too strong a word to say that she betrayed it, even while she perpetuated it in a morbid fashion.

  She got away with it, however, because she did indeed draw on a central aspect of Churchillism. Rather than celebrating the painful transition of turning an empire into a country, Churchillism made it psychologically bearable by denying that Britain is merely normal. It carried this off in a particularly toxic, entrancing way. To start speaking on behalf of the existing British state and its Churchillist structure of feeling stimulates two different parts of the political psyche in a heady combination. Separately, each would be banal or embarrassing. Together they create an irresistible, addictive elixir.

  The first is: we are the ‘underdog’. Britain is a victim, beset by Nazi-Argentine-fascist-fundamentalism (the list does grow). The fact that they are evil proves we are good. Add to this the knowledge that we are just a small island, and it makes us almost pure. Sure, we have done some bad things historically, but they were not that bad – just look at the Belgians in the Congo. Our honestly admitted imperfections merely illuminate our essential goodness. At least we are not and were never fascists. It is a nasty world and, surrounded by it, we are but a modest, embattled island nation.

  Yet we are also great! We may be the underdog but we are not small fry, no sir. Our goodness gives us an inner strength and integrity which, with our long experience, means we can suggest with all due modesty that the world needs our leadership, if we may say so – speaking in the polished, careful diplomatic way for which we are famous – as none had a finer hour than our finest hour. Small and beleaguered underdog though we are, it is time (it is always time) for us to put the country ‘back’ on the world map (because the world needs us) and thus we can ‘put the Great back into Britain.’

  If we claimed only a world role, it would be boastful and implausible. If we said only that we are the underdog, it would be pathetic. But if we say both at the same time, then the two falsehoods seem to permit one another.

  They also recall – or they did for those in power and in their middle age in 1982 – the actual delusion of Britain’s Churchillist establishment at its height. After the Falklands War an inquiry was established to investigate its cause. Lord Franks, as the nearest thing to God in Whitehall, was chosen to chair it. His report is definitely part of the politics of the war. It was more than a whitewash. From its great height it concluded that Thatcher bore no responsibility for provoking the conflict through her deliberate neglect to defend the islands from a despicable dictatorship. Thus was culpability turned into morality by victory, as Franks in effect admitted.13 A more familiar way of putting this is that might is right. It gave birth to the Falklands Syndrome. When the report was published I responded in the New Statesman (republished at the end of this book). I discovered that Franks had given the BBC Reith Lectures in 1954 and took world affairs as his theme. To his own satisfaction, and doubtless that of his fellow mandarins, he demonstrated ‘very simply … Britain is going to continue to be what she has been, a Great Power’.

  ‘Today has put the Great back into Britain.’ They were Thatcher’s own words, after the Union Jack was raised over Port Stanley. When Sir Lawrence Freedman published The Official History of The Falklands Campa
ign in 2005 he felt obliged to record that there was some dissent, or at least a lack of ‘enchantment’ as he put it, with the way the House of Commons committed Britain to war in its special debate on 3 April 1982. So he quoted my description in Iron Britannia of all the symbols of Churchillism that were present:

  an island people, the cruel seas, a British defeat, Anglo-Saxon democracy challenged by a dictator and finally the quintessentially Churchillian posture – we were down but we were not out. The parliamentarians of right, left and centre looked through the mists of time to the Falklands and imagined themselves to be the Grand Old Man. They were, after all, his political children and they too would put the ‘Great’ back into Britain.14

  It did not occur to me that I would return to this argument thirty years down the road. Spoken by Thatcher the slogan is belligerent, thrusting and apparently forward-looking. Thanks to her vision of greatness, trade union closed shops were bust open, the independence of the Civil Service was undermined, and the occult self-government of the City and its financial services demolished with a big bang. At the same time, nostalgia was as integral to her vision as openness; Stuart Hall shrewdly termed the combination Thatcher’s ‘regressive modernisation.’

  Back Again and Again and Again

  Once the Great is back, how do we keep it, especially when to prove that we have it we must let it loose on the world? The Sun, especially, has become addicted to the catchphrase. ‘David Cameron today pledges to Sun readers he will put the Great back into Britain’ was the opening to an interview by the paper’s Political Editor George Pascoe-Watson. (It took place when the Murdochs switched to back Cameron and the Tories against Labour.) At any rate that is what they hoped Cameron was pledging. But what once felt audacious has become a tiresome cliché, now attached to its coverage of the Olympic games. Any UK sporting win can call forth the dream: should British runners, swimmers or rowers cross the line first, or our footballers win a game against Germany, out comes the Union Jack as The Sun celebrates their having personally, in that brief moment of success, put the Great back where it belongs (yet from which it serially escapes). I am giving a final polish to this introduction in Delhi. If you drive into town you can see occasional advertising hoardings encouraging the Indian middle-class to visit Britain, the GREAT country. The letters are huge, woven into images of the countryside or the Olympics, the imperial self-regard rebranded to appear as an attraction that can be shared by booking into a country-house hotel.

  There were three ‘moments’ spanning the last thirty years when it seemed that the stupidity of the longing for greatness was being put aside. The first came soon after the Falklands War. In 1982, despite very long odds, close calls, massive US material assistance, and with only two days of ammunition remaining,15 the enemy surrendered and we won. A burst of books, mostly celebratory or military porn, followed. Set-piece spectaculars fed the tabloids and TV (leading up to a general election in June 1983, its timing manipulated to coincide with the first anniversary of the various battles, ensuring Thatcher’s re-election. I describe this in an additional supporting essay published here for the first time.). And yet a larger Establishment wisdom still survived then, to reject triumphalism. For its service to commemorate the fallen, the Church of England insisted, to the Prime Minister’s fury, on praying for the enemy dead and their families, as victims like our own.16 She was denied a full-scale state triumph and had to persuade the City of London to pay for the victory parade. Despite all the efforts of Thatcher’s team and their control of the timetable, in the 1983 general election her popular vote fell by 700,000. The reason my essay on that election was unpublished is that interest fell away and no further edition of this book appeared after the reprints in early 1983.

  It was not censorship. Military interest in the campaign remained high but a process of wilful forgetting, or mild repression, took place with respect to the demonstration of a martial political culture. It is the Second World War that matters, with its civilian support; a somewhat idiotic Falklands reprise threatens to damage this reputation. Repression, however, is a form of preservation; the hardcore of what had become Thatcher’s military-political culture went unchallenged. It had precipitated an all-party orgasm over the Falklands. The consequence was Thatcher’s supremacy. What followed was the belligerent crushing of the miners and the triumph of market fundamentalism. Meanwhile her military-triumphalist nationalism was re-embalmed and placed back into its neo-gothic locker: out of sight, but with the door left ajar so that its gruesome atmosphere could wrap itself around the brain cells of the denizens of Westminster. To this day it retains its addictive claim on the underlying ‘narrative’ of Britishness.

  If the first moment when there was a move away from defining ourselves in terms of the Falklands followed hard upon the war itself, the second arose a full twenty years on. In 2002 Tony Blair was riding high on New Labour’s form of ‘modern modernisation’ – global, young, de-regulating and dismissive of institutions and history. Even though Blair was processing Thatcher’s Falklands example in his initial response to 9/11, this fatal calculation had not yet done its work. He had prepared the ground in Chicago, he had decided to back Bush at all costs. But there had not yet been the illegal invasion of Iraq. Instead, Britain was a country that had just re-elected a Labour government, which began to invest in schools and hospitals after saving the NHS and education from the locust years of Major.17

  It would have seemed ungenerous, back then, ten years ago, to regard Blair as addicted to war overseas when he had played such an important role in the Good Friday agreement.18 The intelligent negotiation of power sharing in Belfast, the concession that the Dublin government had an interest in the sovereignty of part of the UK itself, the explicit inclusion of human rights and the framework of the EU, together ended the UK’s local civil war. Whatever its faults, today it seems all the more important to emphasise that this saw the UK dropping the rhetoric that ‘terrorism must be defeated’, or that there can be no negotiation with a nihilist ‘other’, or that the enemy must concede absolutely on principle. All this was a break from Thatcherism. The IRA were brought in despite the fact that they had not yet completely disarmed, had only promised to stop killing and work inside the structures. There was a relentless flow of warnings that it was all a ploy, a pause before the terrorist campaign could be resumed; so it did take some nerve and it built on patient work under the John Major and Dublin governments. The agreement stopped most domestic terrorism and made us look civilised rather than hungry for battle and intransigence. In comparison, the Falklands seemed to fade into a ridiculous, atavistic episode.

  Evidence of the extraordinarily opened-minded nature of Britain – back then, ten years ago and before Iraq – was also noted recently by John Harris: 68% of respondents told pollsters that the country should stay in the EU and only 19% wanted out. Today half the country wants to leave the EU altogether, while supporters of staying in have halved, slumping to 33%.19 In part this may be a healthy reaction to European leaders who behave with ineptitude and unaccountable arrogance. The wish to walk away from them is not without democratic self-confidence. However, those of us who resist this tide are not talking about joining the euro but retaining a place within the larger EU, whose influence is inescapable. The driving spirit behind the growth of populist attitudes is once again regressive – it feels to many people as if collaborating with other countries is sapping our vital fluids. The fact that we have neighbours who exercise an influence over us could hardly be more natural but apparently stops us being ourselves – traders and swashbucklers in the free-market global planet. This attitude, increasingly prevalent, is anti-immigrant, hostile to human rights, belligerently defiant and seeks to defy the world by a ‘return’ to what we once were.

  You think I’m exaggerating? Open the locker. In her 1982 victory speech on the lesson of the Falklands, Thatcher proclaimed that Britain was still ‘the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world … The lesson is tha
t Britain has not changed …’ Today, Daniel Hannan MEP tells Daily Telegraph readers we must leave the Argentinians ‘in no doubt that we are still the people we were’ when we defeated them in 1982.20

  But who are the people being addressing by Hannan and many like him? Who is it that must be ‘in no doubt’ that we are still, in 2012, the people we were in 1982, when we proved that we are the people who built an Empire and have not changed?

  Ourselves. The rhetoric is addressed to ourselves not the Argentinians: to the public as a whole, the Telegraph-reading centre-right (especially to strengthen their patriotic resolve), and to our political class, our politico-media-public-relations-policy-elite, who fear the UK returning to the years of failure and humiliation that marked the 1970s. Years when the demoralising, perpetual ‘management of decline’ took the joy out of power in Britain. Thatcher and the Falklands War rescued us from this fate – we need something similar now.

  This is still an argument that is underway, not a course that has been set. The nature of Cameron’s leadership is as yet unresolved, and in its absence of conviction it appeared to offer the third reason why the days of the Falklands Syndrome might be over, as he set about ‘detoxifying’ the Tory ‘brand’. In his first speech as Prime Minister to his Party Conference it is true he struck a Kitcheneresque note with, ‘Your country needs you’, yet he continued, describing his ‘Big Society’:

  It is government changing its role … helping to build a nation of doers and go-getters … This is not about a bit more power for you and a bit less power for central government – it’s a revolution … We are the radicals now, breaking apart the old system with a massive transfer of power, from the state to citizens, politicians to people, government to society.21