Yet there is something unconvincing about this picture. For the expanded role of the City as an international financial centre needs depoliticization more than anything. Switzerland is surely the model, and policies that threaten to politicize the role of the City run the risk of undermining its international position, hence its unwillingness to impose too stringent sanctions upon Buenos Aires. In other words, the military over-extension of the British state, while it may share the same origins as the financial globalism of the City, could now be an impediment to the latter’s interests. Indeed the reason for the UK’s refusal to formally declare war on Argentina may have been related to this tension. The State Research group has pointed out in its Bulletin No. 30, that a legal declaration of war would have had severe commercial consequences for the City.
But if this is true, did any special interests encourage Britain to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands? Undoubtedly there was a strong Navy lobby at work behind the scenes. In addition, it was said that there are fabulous resources underneath the Antarctic ice, there is oil off the Falklands as well. Could this be why the Armada was sent? To secure for Great Britain a slice of the immense riches of the far southern hemisphere, now waiting to be tapped? The question seems to gain force when the size and efficiency of the Falklands lobby is considered. Nine MPs are members of the United Kingdom Falkland Islands Committee—about one MP for less than 100 families on the Islands themselves, an extraordinary ratio.29 Evidently, the MPs must be interested in something else, apart from the actual inhabitants. The Falkland Islands Company helped to establish the Committee in 1968 and contributes to its funds. Here then, it seems, is a powerful financial interest that seeks to sustain Parliamentary allegiance to the South Atlantic. The oddity, however, is that something that is the opposite of a conspiracy of gain may have been at work, for the Company was moving to improve its now profitable relations with Buenos Aires. It was nostalgia for one of the last colonies and dreams of Empire rather than base calculation that attracted MPs to the Falkland lobby.
Evidence of this can be seen in the more serious discussions of the resource potential of the Falklands. The Shackleton Report, for example, which will be considered in Chapter 7, was primarily concerned with such an assessment.
Its conclusions were cautious. The value and accessibility of the off-shore oil around the Islands have probably been exaggerated, in its view. Although oil probably does exist under the surrounding waters, the surface conditions are worse than those of the North Sea, while the location is much further removed from major centres of consumption. The costs of extraction, therefore, might prove exhorbitant. Only one thing was absolutely certain, the Report stressed. No development of the oil reserves would be possible without the co-operation of Argentina. The risks of contested sovereignty would scare off potential investors while the logistic problems alone dictated the need for Argentinian collaboration. Hence, in Shackleton’s view, a resolution of the sovereignty issue and political stability were the pre-condition for future economic development on any scale. An oil lobby then, which desired to profit from the zone’s potential, would have pushed for a settlement with Buenos Aires, not further contest and certainly not a clash of arms. If anything, the Foreign Office was doing its best to assuage such business interests. The oil lobby—and who can doubt that such exists?—was almost certainly against the war.
It does not follow that the idea of oil and other riches did not have its effect upon the behaviour of MPs. The ultra-patriots of the House of Commons were in search of a cause. What could make them seem more farsighted than predictions about the value of the krill in the South Atlantic—the high protein types of prawn on which the whales once used to feed? The capacity of parliamentarians to be impressed by fatuous ideas has always been notable. Tories who scorn Marxism for its base approach to politics think nothing of wheeling out ludicrous economic arguments to justify their beliefs. By this behaviour they do indeed pose a certain problem for materialists. For it is evident that the MPs are not ‘objectively determined’ by such notions. Edward du Cann who referred to the ‘substantial treasures’ of the South Atlantic in the special Saturday debate of 3 April, was no closer to a balance sheet of Antarctic assets than any old gossip down the road. His real concern was not the potential wealth but the idea that it was British: Whatever it was out there, it should be ours. Despite its economic form, his argument was the pure expression of a political culture.
A further example of the fantastical notions which possessed the Falklands lobby in the Commons came on 20 May. In that day’s debate, David Atkinson, the Conservative MP for Bournemouth East, spoke in support of Thatcher. (Sir John Eden who spoke on 3 April represents Bournmouth West; obviously Bournmouth takes a great interest in the Falklands.) The world does not trade with Britain and buy its goods, Atkinson pointed out, because the products of the UK were better in quality than West Germany’s or cheaper than those offered by Japan. Why then, did anyone purchase goods from the UK? ‘Countries … trade with us still because of other qualities for which we are peculiar as a nation—qualities which we are now displaying and principles which we are now defending’.30 This is a new version of ‘trade follows the flag’; British products will be sought after and imported despite the fact that they are both over-expensive and poor in quality because, when push comes to shove in the Falklands or elsewhere, the lion still barks …. These ‘economic’ arguments, we can see, are merely a pretence. Their aim is to coat the unbusinesslike behaviour of British politics with a veneer of economic realism.
In Chapter 3, I wrote that when the MPs debated the Falklands on 3 April, they looked at the South Atlantic through the eyes of Churchill and believed that they too ‘would put the Great back into Britain’. I thought about this phrase, and discussed it with others. Was it not too cheap a shot and too glib a description? Perhaps I was pushing my case too far, and thus weakening its impact. Then, on the evening of the victory at Port Stanley, Thatcher emerged from No 10 to say, ‘Today has put the Great back into Britain’. Later, as we have seen, she claimed in her Cheltenham speech that Britain is still the country that once ruled a quarter of the globe. Thatcher has overseen an acceleration in the relative decline of the UK compared to other second level powers. Yet she has asserted a Churchillian renaissance that has wonderfully transported the country back into becoming a world power once again.
Thatcherism can be regarded as a new variant, if a more extreme one, of the mind-set that has held all British politicians in its grip since 1945. For if the crippling aspect of Churchillism were to be summed up in one sentence, it is that British politicians have been unable to articulate a programme of reform for the UK as a minor industrial power except in terms that seek to reassert Britain’s world greatness. The roots of this over-ambition, one that has led government after government to under-achievement, lies in the wartime conflation, when the country was saved in the name of the Empire. There are two different aspects to the British collapse then; in both of which it should be noted the military has played a role. The first is the vertiginous decline of the United Kingdom from its role as a world power to a position in the cluster of second rank placemen. This actually took place during the Second World War, indeed one could argue that its defining event was the expulsion of the expeditionary force from Europe at Dunkirk. It was fully revealed by the Suez crisis in 1956, when Moscow threatened to rocket-bomb London and Washington used its financial leverage to impose a humiliating withdrawal. The end of London’s role as the centre of a planetary empire was the consequence of external change: it was bound to come however skilled and far-sighted its leaders might have been, because the rest of the world could never be subordinated to its dictation. But while this definitive and irreversible fall was brought about by forces beyond Britain’s power, it has been compounded since 1945 by an additional type of decline. The UK has ‘become one of the weakest and least successful of the second rate powers’.31
Here we find the second and ‘unnecessa
ry’ aspect of the collapse. That Britain would cease to be a global power was inevitable. That it had also to become an economic cripple compared to other European states was not. The rational task of modernization in Britain is to transform its society into a relatively thriving and prosperous second rank country that might achieve the standard of living of, say, Holland. But this apparently modest ambition—one which today would nonetheless mean doubling the national product—is far too modest for the politicians of Westminster. For them, to say that one wants the UK to be a northern European country like the others, is virtually treason. Britishness, the national essence, demands much more, in their view.
Ironically, one of the keywords with which many express this compression of the two aspects of the British decline is ‘appeasement’. The collapse of British power is somehow blamed upon the weak-willed Chamberlain along with his supporters, and now their latter day reincarnations in the Foreign Office. The decline and fall of the Empire was due to a failure of will and a culture of insouciance in this view. Of course there is at least an iota of truth to the argument, which describes the style in which the decline was conducted. But by placing the blame for the termination of Britain’s global role on a domestic failure of the spirit, it is implicitly suggested that if only the British could now act differently, one could resuscitate the bygone greatness. Condemnations of ‘appeasement’ today—in the context of the Parliamentary nation—have buried within them an assertion of past world power as somehow still an actual potential for Westminster.32
No major British politician has yet commanded any support for denouncing the lure of the old glories. Many in the UK might be receptive to such an appeal. Perhaps part of the positive response Thatcher has elicited when she demands sacrifice is a ‘popular realism’ that is far more up to date than hers. But the dominant mode of expression remains bound to Churchillism. Successive governments seek to defend the diminished position of Britain by striving for its old and irretrievable position. Anthony Eden expressed his determination to wrest back the Suez Canal, by insisting that Nasser was the reincarnation of Hitler. Macmillan sought a place for himself as one of the ‘Big Three’ alongside Kennedy and Kruschev. Harold Wilson, within a month of taking office as Prime Minister told the City of London Lord Mayor’s banquet, ‘We are a world power and a world influence, or we are nothing’.33 He was attacking racialism in the Midlands, but the sentiment illuminated an all party feeling. Seven years later Edward Heath defended his government’s successful application to join the Common Market in these terms: ‘We have the chance of a new greatness, we must go in if we want to remain Great Britain, and take the chance of becoming Greater Britain’.34 Similarly, the task that the united House of Commons gave to Margaret Thatcher on 3 April was to defend and preserve the national fantasy of Britain’s global destiny. And when Thatcher rejoiced over the Falklands victory, she welcomed precisely her ability to lay claim to the ‘Great’ tradition.
While all the wise leaders of the Kingdom see it as their task to ensure that Britain remains ‘Great’, and while the population votes for those who seem most plausible in this theatre, it seems that the decline bestowed by Churchillism is destined to continue.
The self-punishing ambition has been expressed above all in terms of excessive military expenditure. Today the British habit of mocking soldiers has turned sour. The celebration of coercion which accompanied the Falklands Armada shows every sign of returning to the United Kingdom. It is a theme that Thatcher sought from the beginning of her leadership of the Conservative Party. The ‘Iron Lady’ initially directed her ferrous gaze eastwards towards the bear. She was presumably mortified when few took this seriously. Now she has gained the belligerent nationalist colours that her policies always needed to appear to succeed. For behind the hardness of Thatcher’s approach there is a commitment to the market rather than production. She is not concerned about getting the country to work, rather she wants its services to work well. Rules, not output, are what she is attached to, and ultimately the possibility of positive regimentation lies behind such a perspective. Militarization might well become domesticated in a way that has been missing from Britain hitherto. Soldiers have always paraded in central London, but in colourful uniforms and as a tourist attraction rather than a warning to the population. For a decade in Ireland, the forces have had an altogether more ominous and unattractive role. Now, the military may be projected as one of the few agencies who can ‘get things done’. The reference to the ‘coolly professional British forces’ in the Economist is a possible warning. What if the Falklands fail to give the nation its needed ‘surge’ of self-confidence? What if the country is so churlish and ungrateful not to work hard enough? Might not this be construed as a betrayal of those who have sacrificed their lives for the British way of life? Perhaps a bit of that cool professionalism will have to be applied at home, to ‘liberate’ the mainland itself from the legacy of the ‘progressive consensus’ Thatcher denounced in 1975 … Whatever one might think of that possibility, there can be little doubt that Thatcher’s form of Churchillism has been to turn against its social legacy the name of Churchill himself. The more she succeeds, the more all other tendencies in British political life will have to undertake their own reckoning with the past.
*
Margaret Thatcher granted a special interview to the Daily Express on 26 July. ‘It was understood right from the outset that the honour of our people and our country was at stake’, she said about the Falklands. Success there she continued, has ‘boosted Britain in the international world colossally’. It was a revealing emphasis: it was neither the Kelpers nor the islands that mattered so much as British pride. As for the Conservative Party it shows that what is needed is ‘not consensus, not compromise, but conviction, action, persistence, until the job is well and truly finished.’ And economic recovery? The Prime Minister said, ‘We are looking for self-starters. We are looking for princes of industry, people who have fantastic ability to build things and create jobs’. The unrealism of Thatcherism may be most perfectly expressed in this sentiment, one which rejects the state-led investment of Gaullism. Instead, we are offered an authoritarian populism, a celebrant militarism, a pitiful nostalgia, the export of capital, fewer jobs for lower real wages, non-existent ‘princes of industry’, and, oh yes, the Falklands.
Notes
1 For a good condemnation of this see Ralph Miliband’s postscript in Parliamentary Socialism, second edn, London 1972, pp. 361-4.
2 See my article, ‘Heath, the Unions and the State’, NLR, 77, January 1973.
3 Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, Cambridge 1981, p. 163.
4 T.F. Lindsay and Michael Harrington, The Conservative Party, 1918-1979, second edn, London 1979, p. 278.
5 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Let Our Children Grow Tall’, speech of 15 September 1975, in Selected Speeches, 1975-1977, London 1977, p. 9.
6 Ajit Singh, ‘“Full Employment Capitalism” and the Labour Party’, The Socialist Register, 1981, p. 12; a vivid summary of Thatcher’s havoc.
7 Hansard, 20 May 1981, p. 470.
8 Observer, 25 February 1979, as cited by Hugh Stephenson, Mrs Thatcher’s First Year, London 1980.
9 Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, London 1950, p. 597.
10 Keith Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society, London 1979, p. 400.
11 Anthony Sampson, The Changing Anatomy of Britain, London 1982, p. 46.
12 Andrew Gamble, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Bunker: the Reshuffle and its Consequences’, Marxism Today, November 1981, p. 10.
13 Malcolm Rutherford, 16 June 1982.
14 Julian Critchley, 21 June 1982.
15 Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, NLR 23, January 1964. For E.P. Thompson’s disagreement, see ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in The Poverty of Theory, London 1978.
16 New Statesman, 18 April 1975.
17 See Tom Nairn’s postscript to the new edition
of The Breakup of Britain. Verso, London 1981, pp. 381-387.
18 ‘The Falklands Crisis’. Encounter, June-July 1982.
19 Economist, 19 June 1982, p. 42. Parliament also gave him a mauling; for an important account of the Falklands debate of 4 December 1980, see Michael Davie, Observer, 30 May 1982.
20 Standard, 23 June 1982, an embarrassing revelation.
21 11 June 1982.
22 Peter Kellner wrote a devastating column on British secrecy and the constitutional, or rather the non-constitutional issues posed, New Statesman, 9 July 1982.
23 Guardian, 9 June 1982.
24 Especially as Raymond Whitney posed exactly this problem in the 3 April debate.
25 Quoted in Miliband, p. 303.
26 For example, Tom Nairn. The Left Against Europe? NLR 75, Sept. 1972.
27 Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Marxism Today, January 1979, a text of enviable foresight and judgement, written before Thatcher’s election victory.
28 International, May-June 1982: this is a variant of Gamble’s explanation No. 1, while Thatcher’s own view is No. 3.
29 Of the nine, four made speeches in the 3 April debate (Sir Nigel Fisher, Russell Johnston, Ted Rowlands and Donald Stewart) and two others recorded questions or interruptions. For the full list, Financial Times 19 April 1982.
30 Hansard for 20 May 1982, p. 519. Atkinson ended with the observation, ‘He who dares, wins’, the motto of the SAS.
Iron Britannia Page 16