Iron Britannia

by Anthony Barnett

  Why was this? In part because expatriotism, while it usurps and exploits the old sentiments in its red-neck fashion, even to the point of caricature, nonetheless appeals to the ‘real thing’. That is why disagreement, however trenchant, must reassess past as well as present, to succeed. Here I will only discuss two historic themes, pastoralism and heroism as they were reprocessed by the Falklands.

  When Argentina seized the Falklands, film was shown on British television of recent interviews with the islanders. Their evident British accents and rural gait made a deep impression. It was as if ‘the Nazis had taken over the Archers’.13 Again, the reference might seem opaque to foreigners. The Archers is ‘an everyday story of countryfolk’, broadcast daily since 1951 from the small fictitious village of ‘Ambridge’. ‘There is some corner in the English mind that is forever Ambridge’, noted one observer, who added ‘rightly or wrongly, the village represents an ideal living state’.14 The ideal of the countryside and ‘countryfolk’ is an immensely powerful cultural force not only in England, but in Scotland and Wales as well. Martin Wiener has provided an extensive documentation of the ubiquity and the centrality of rural ideals in British political and economic life. From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and especially from Baldwin’s ‘England is the country’, to Callaghan’s acquisition of a farm from whose gate he was photographed, Baldwin-like, as Prime Minister (it provides a link with ‘the peasant in us’, commented Mrs Callaghan); Wiener shows that rusticity holds both Right and Left in a joint condemnation of ‘industrialism’.

  It is easy to be scathing about the country-cottage fetish and allotment consciousness of the English, which, with its strain of retreat, determination against the rain and self-sufficiency, was one of the binding subseams of Churchillism. The suture of interclass, capitalist hegemony has been hand-sewn with a rural stitch in England, to give it added strength. At the same time, as Wiener points out, the country was ‘available for use as an integrating cultural symbol’ precisely because it was virtually empty and hence safe. ‘The vision of a tranquilly rustic and traditional national way of life (which) permeated English life’ originated with massive depopulation of the actual countryside.15 Vacant land is sacred.

  This reflection might seem of slight relevance to an analysis of the Falklands Crisis; in fact, it helps explain the strange social empathy with such a distant corner of the world. The joining together of support for the Armada from distinct, and even antagonistic, sectors of the population was partially shaped by shared, historic attitudes of nostalgia towards an ‘empty’ countryside, at once as remote and as mythologically intimate as Ambridge. By contrast, had the population of the islands been engaged in a company mineworks, the evidently industrial nature of their settlement might not have been so accommodating to mythologization—and a generous, negotiated compromise might not have seemed ‘inhuman’ or destructive of the local ‘British way of life’. Ironically it was the very blighted quality of the rural setting that made the Falklanders seem so ‘organic’ and ‘noble’. The English consciousness with its gentrified repression of urban and industrial reality regards the tiny village as somehow central and the towns—in which 90 per cent of the population lives—as artificial. The solitary life of the Kelpers seemed to have had a kind of ultimate authenticity.

  Furthermore, the allure of rural imagery in a (bitterly) ironic military setting, also has a notable tradition which dates back to the formative shock of the Great War and its trenches. In his exceptionally revealing cultural history, Paul Fussell shows how the intense ruralism of English culture (he notes that half the poems in the Oxford Book of English Verse are about flowers) was turned to a new use in the literary response to the 1914-18 conflict. ‘Recourse to the pastoral is an English mode of both fully gauging the calamities of the Great War and imaginatively protecting oneself against them.’16 Reading his book after the Falklands War, one cannot help but be struck by the ludicrous descent of media cant from the first full experience of modern war that Britain underwent. A minor irony is the Island’s sheep, an image consistently used about the men who went obediently to their slaughter after 1914; used not just in contempt or protest but also in homoerotic compassion, as the lambs whose sacrificial blood will flow to feed the poppies.17 In 1982 an anti-war postcard captured this echo with its slogan ‘600,000 Sheep Can’t Be Wrong’. Another theme is the beauty of the sky, to which the English seem especially attached since their romantics, an attachment theorized by Ruskin. From the trenches, of course, the sky was always visible, if only beckoning, while all men ‘stood-to’ at sunrise and sunset, the moments of the heaven’s magnificent intensity.18 Again, reporters in the Falklands were always commenting upon the light and the sky. The riveting skyscapes of Vietnam and Cambodia, by contrast, never drew such breathless description from American reporters.

  All these seemingly remote, arcadian notations were brought to bear, apparently naively and all the more effectively, by Lord Shackleton when he spoke about the Falklands on the day after the Argentinian invasion. Shackleton as well as being a Lord is a Labour peer and the son of the famous global explorer. As such he is one personification of mid-century Churchillism. He had been sent to the Falklands in 1975 to report on the colony, and his description of life there will be considered in Chapter 7. On 3 April 1982, he spoke on behalf of the Labour Party in the House of Lords debate, following Lord Carrington. Shackleton lamented the takeover and eulogized the Falklands. Some might say that their inhabitants are merely ‘Scottish’. In fact, ‘they might be Londoners as much as anyone else. They are totally British’. As for the Falkland Islands themselves,

  for those who like wild, windy places and empty spaces like the Shetlands, it is a very delightful place where the light is bright and clear. I remember talking to a man who came there from Coventry who told me how much happier he was there than when he was working on a production line.19

  This summarizes what we can term ‘Falklands Pastoralism’: the windswept voids embraced by an English rural aesthetic; the stress upon the beauties of the light; the ‘Britishness’ affirmed, and above all the contrast, apparently powerful, actually trite, between the happiness of a blighted rural existence and the treatment humans receive on the production line. The contrast is a cheap one not only because without the line there would be no community on the Falklands today, but also because of the crass caricature of working class urbanism and even middle class suburbanism which is implied. Our pre-eminently industrial existence is reduced in living terms to the worst excesses of machine assembly.

  A multiple echo can be heard in Shackleton’s ruminations upon the brightness of the South Atlantic sky and the press reports of the same. For when Ruskin produced his theory of the qualities of the atmosphere, he drew upon the same metaphor as The Times: ‘The still small voice’. It comes from I Kings19.

  And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and a strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD: but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake: but the LORD was not in the earthquake.

  And after the earthquake a fire: but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

  In this fashion did God speak to Elijah. Today a newspaper which once prided itself on being called ‘The Thunderer’ now has the audacity to claim to be the vehicle for the deity Himself. Through this elitism it also lays claim to democracy. For the English version of popular rule is that only a cultivated few seem really able to appreciate what is undoubtedly best for the many. In Modern Painters Ruskin lauded the open sky and was far more interesting than today’s Times. For him, nature produces in the sky ‘picture after picture, glory after glory’, of such beauty that it ‘is quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure (for) every man, wherever placed’. While, ‘the noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known by but a few’, ‘the sky is for all; as bright as it is, it is not “too bright or good for nature’s daily food”�
�. The sky, then, in its splendid panoramas, presents a democratic vision. God, Ruskin immediately reminds his readers, ‘is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still small voice’. The Falklands may be windy, but His brightness reaches even there. Who better to appreciate this than a Labour peer and what better reason for sending the fleet than to ensure that English eyes remain there to appreciate its isolated beauties, and English accents send back their thanks, in a still small voice?

  Wiener might regard Shackleton’s intervention as a vindication of the major thesis of his study as he argues that there is indeed something that can be termed an industrial ‘cultural revolution’, and that Britain has rejected this in favour of an anti-industrial spirit, largely rural inspired, which in turn has been responsible for the decline of the UK as a manufacturing centre.20 In other words, Wiener accepts the validity of the opposition—the dichotomy propagandized by Victorian thinkers themselves—and he does so on the simplest terms. Yet to do so at all, is surely fatal. All things being equal, who would not prefer a country house with bad drainage, no public transport and television to a look-alike terrace dwelling with bad drainage, no public transport and television. At least, during daytime, the former has a view … No, the point is that this contrast and the choice it implies, is itself unrealistic. It is not the benefits of country air that should be criticized, but the mythology of a rural society which is held especially by those who live in towns, to compensate for their own lives. What is needed is not so much a critique of ruralism as such, for this has indeed given expression to many fine things of lasting value, but to the English way of counter-posing town and country. A way perfectly realized by Shackleton in miniature and recognized for what it is on the larger scale by Raymond Williams,

  Our powerful images of country and city have been ways of responding to a whole social development. That is why, in the end, we must not limit ourselves to their contrast but must go on to see their interrelations and through these the real shape of the underlying crisis.21

  Here we cannot attend to the underlying crisis. But it flickered through the strange identifications that were made during the war, with its hopes, fears and even desires for a more extended solidarity. After the British victory there were various attempts to raise money for the South Atlantic Fund. One young woman from a London salon announced, in a by no means upper class accent, that her shop would hold a ‘hairdressing marathon’ to bring in donations. Interviewed on radio she explained that she was doing this because,

  They are out there defending us. Because although they are out there thousands of miles away, it could be us, it could be us out there.22

  The racial identification is obvious enough—she would not have done the same for soldiers fighting for the rights of the Diego Garcians. But it is also unlikely that she would have striven to support a community of northern industrial workers who wanted to cling to their old ways. ‘It could be us out there ….’ It may be that she can only make that identification culturally with an ‘Ambridge’ brought to her across the ether, but actually there is no ‘could’ about it: it really is us, ‘us’ back here where we are, that needs to be defended.

  It was not only a rural spider that spun the identification. There was also a traditional urban theme, but one made safe by appropriating it into the heroic virtues of foreign conflict. Gareth Stedman Jones has suggested that the English working class was ‘re-made’ in the last three decades of Victorian imperialism that culminated in the relief of Mafeking and the riotous celebrations that followed this battle success in South Africa.23 He describes the way in which the vast human agglomeration of London, a city of trade, services and small workshops—at the time the largest in the world but almost devoid of big factories—produced a new, ‘Tory’ working class culture, articulated by pubs and the new music halls. It was a culture consciously separate from the improving middle classes and fatalistic rather than celebrant. The ‘comic stoicism’ that produced Charlie Chaplin and was to be eulogized in the 1940 Blitz, came into existence at that time, along, it may be added, with most other British traditions.

  But when the mediacrats joined the task force on its way to the South Atlantic, they were overwhelmed by the novelty of what they experienced. The trumpeting of old military virtues that was the achievement of sub-editors and headline writers in London and their equivalents in TV and radio presentation in the live media, was accompanied by a genuine emotion of respect for the fighting men. One of the more graphic and telling descriptions came from Patrick Bishop,

  Most of the 15 journalists on the Canberra began the voyage feeling mild dread at the prospect of the enforced company of so many soldiers. We ended up ‘Troopie groupies’ of varying degrees of intensity, loyal to our units and fluent in military slang …. At best, I patronisingly thought, the military would be amiable but bone-headed. Many of them emerged as intelligent and tolerant.24

  Max Hastings was more up front,

  It has been an extraordinary, genuinely uplifting experience to soldier for a few weeks with the British forces. After so many years in which we have heard and said so much about British failure in so many areas of our national life, in the past few weeks I have been exposed to almost unbroken generosity, spontaneous kindness, patience, comradeship towards a common aim.

  Working beside men much more tired, wet, dirty, cold, hungry than oneself, I have never been grudged a drink or a cigarette or space in a bivouac or a chance to sleep in a trench.25

  Evidently, these are not the attitudes he would find amongst his colleagues in Fleet Street. The same impression seems to have been made on Gareth Parry of the Guardian,

  In three months I never heard a cross word spoken, but many a helpful and humorous one.26

  Bishop was similarly impressed,

  The soldiers showed each other remarkable loyalty and kindness … The comfort they gave each other was almost feminine. I remember three of them soothing a man who had shrapnel in his legs, feeding him cigarettes and reassuring him that the wounds weren’t as bad as they seemed.27

  In what circles is such behaviour so remarkable as to be somehow exceptional and unexpected? Would not factory or mine workers treat each other in the same way if one of their comrades suffered an industrial accident? The navy officer who justified to Gareth Parry the decision not to grant the seamen extra pay was aware of this side of things,

  They are pretty lucky to be here in regular employment and not on the dole queue at home.28

  This was the source of the fortitude. For a short time the mediacrats left their well paid, intensely competitive and fashionably cynical world, to live in and share a working class milieu. They discovered that the troglodites knew how to suffer and survive, that they had a sense of humour and realism and a natural solidarity. The mediacrats were moved. There was bravery and hardship and sacrifice on the Falklands. But is the heroism of a teenager storming Mount Tumbledown that much greater than the determination of a middle-aged man with a family trying to last out redundancy and keep his honour and self-esteem? Or, indeed, of the heroism of a man who returns to work on the line day after day? Even within the traditionally accepted universe of ‘masculine’ courage and ‘feminine’ kindliness, the qualities that uplifted Max Hastings and his cohorts came not from the Army but from the soldiers’s homes. To condemn the coverage of the war, then, involves neither belittling the bravery that was displayed nor a denial of the experience which so affected the mediacrats. What was nauseating was to read in 1982, towards the end of the century of total war, descriptions of the fighting men that betrayed little if any sense that there were lessons already learnt, and to be told that everyday working class virtues had suddenly been born again, thanks to their military uniforms. If Fleet Street and the BBC were to send their reporters to live with strikers, say, and share their life and wages, we might hear a great deal more about spontaneous courage, kind words and generosity in adverse circumstances in Britain. Again, that is not said to idealize the working class, who ar
e as capable of looting as the British troops on the Falklands proved themselves to be. Indeed the often reckless values of the British worker were summed up in one respect by the ASLEF train driver, who spoke to a Financial Times reporter with bitterness after his strike had been broken in the aftermath of the Falklands, ‘I’ve been a Tory all my life but no longer after this.’29

  An equally serious aspect of the media’s role was the way it was censored. The particular importance was visual rather than factual. After some of the first air engagements, a Harrier pilot described the way he fired his Sidewinder missile: it homed in on the enemy Mirage and exploded ‘as advertised’. We saw only his words. During the war there were no photographs of battlefield dead. This ‘treatment’ was not accidental. Don McCullin, undoubtedly Britain’s most famous photo-journalist, was repeatedly refused permission to cover the Falklands. A ‘high ranking military officer’ vetoed his going.30 Instead, an official ‘war artist’ was sent; she came from the Kitson family of military fame. McCullin records what he sees as ‘the sharp end’—sometimes at great risk to himself, as recently in El Salvador—and his photographs are often shocking. Ironically, their impact is diminished by context, for as a Sunday Times photographer his pictures usually appear in the colour supplement alongside other images of far-away places. Idyllic holiday-spots, menthylated fields, soft-lit boudoirs, all inhabited by beautiful people, project from the outlying pages a world untouched by the maimed and beyond the reach of trenches and shrapnel. The British Ministry of Defence chose to project the Falklands war as just such an advertisement: and while the fighting was taking place and support really mattered, such images as McCullin’s were ruled to be incongruous.