But not only by Thatcher. For when Ridley returned he could not present the House of Commons with the Islanders’ assent. Instead, Peter Shore leapt upon him from the Labour benches to assert the ‘paramouncy’ of the Islanders’ wishes, something that was never Labour’s policy but which would henceforth bind them to Thatcher’s chariot.
Even after his Parliamentary ambush, Ridley continued to press for a campaign to sell the policy of leaseback to the Islanders and to warn opinion in Britain, given the mounting risk of a military showdown. Carrington thought the effort hopeless, evidently because he could not get the Prime Minister’s support – but again the Report does not tell us anything specific on this score. Instead, while concern about a confrontation mounted it was decided to withdraw the Endurance. Thus the Thatcher government decided simultaneously to continue to negotiate, to concede nothing and to reduce its guard.
*
Now why, after the humiliating excesses of the Falklands War, should we have to suffer the further embarrassment of this grovelling whitewash? There are a number of different, supporting answers. At least one of them concerns the general approach to world affairs of Britain since the war. There can be few better places to look for an expression of this approach than Lord Franks’s own Reith Lectures in 1954, delivered when he returned from being our Ambassador in Washington. He titled his keynote address to the nation ‘Britain and the Tide of World Affairs.’ It was an extended advocacy of what he observed to be the governing impulse of British political life. Although Parliament seems to be full of noisy divisions and disagreements, Franks noted that on major issues decisions were quite uncontested: the creation of NATO, the positioning of troops in Germany, the rebuilding of the ‘Sterling Area,’ the commitment to a nuclear programme. This consensus flowed from an accepted principle, Franks argued: ‘It can be stated very simply. Britain is going to continue to be what she has been, a Great Power.’ His lectures were dedicated to arguing that this is indeed the case.
He then went on to prescribe the future course for British politics. Take the Commonwealth for example. Younger readers of the New Statesman in 1983 will be forgiven if they think that the Commonwealth is an athletic association. For Lord Franks it has been something different. The Commonwealth, above all else, ‘enables us to play in the big league with the continental powers.’ Indeed, ‘the basic condition for the continuing greatness of Britain is a vigorous Commonwealth.’ It is a club, true, ‘but never before has there been anything like it in the world.’
Franks’s world view was, even in 1954, a ludicrous anachronism; and there is little evidence that it has changed since. In The Times the day before his Report was published, a magnificent puff was emitted. Lord Franks, its headline states, has ‘an alpha treble plus mind,’ with an exceptional capacity to penetrate to the facts. His Reith lectures, however, are a charivari of wishful thinking.
And something in the attitude of the present report was foreshadowed succinctly by one Franks passage in 1954:
Little argument is needed to show the necessity of the Commonwealth to Britain’s continuing greatness. It is a truth which the British people have intuitively perceived: they do not require a demonstration. What is this small island with its 50,000,000 inhabitants if it has to go it alone?
The answer, of course, is that it is the British people! But for Lord Franks this is not enough, such a people would have to be part of Europe or a dependency of the United States. The British people, however, according to Franks, will always,
carry through what they believe necessary for the continuing greatness of their country.
In other words, they will work two shifts (that was in 1954) and keep down wages, or today suffer unemployment, and keep down wages, so as to ensure that the Frankses of this country, and the Thatchers, can believe themselves to represent a world power, in the ‘big league.’
This is what the Falklands was about. And this is why the Report is hopelessly inadequate as an explanation of why something that should not have happened did take place. J. M. Barrie observed that when people answer a question with ‘The fact is,’ then that is the beginning of a lie. When a diplomat leans forward and says to a reporter in confidence and off-the-record ‘to be absolutely frank,’ then you can be sure that while what follows may not be a lie, it will always in some way be misleading. At least that is so in my experience.
So perhaps we should now coin a new phrase: ‘To be absolutely Franks.’ It has nothing to do with lying. It is not a form of mendacity of the sort that we 50 million tadpoles are concerned with in our mundane island. No, it is an altogether higher form of misleading. To be absolutely Franks combines utter self-assurance with complete self-deception. Each statement may be exact. Each step from one proposition to another will seem quite unimpeachable. Yet the whole thing is simply off the wall.
Time to Take the Great out of Britain
First published in the New Statesman, 17 June 1983.
This article is the edited text of an Opinions programme shown on Channel 4 on 16 June. Although broadcast yesterday, it was recorded before the election was declared. The campaign provided more evidence for the argument that all parties share a fantasy of national greatness.
The Alliance captured the straining for greatness best of all. Its manifesto stated: ‘We yearn for a world role and are qualified by our history and experience to perform one’. Perhaps no other single word more aptly sums up its politics than ‘yearning’.
Labour was confused about Britain’s global role. In some interviews Michael Foot argued that the UK would lead the world to disarmament. At the start of the campaign he declared that Britain is ‘a nation which built an Empire and then generously gave it away’. Apparently he wanted such generosity to continue.
For her part Thatcher evoked British history as a chain of people, ‘linked by a common belief in freedom and in Britain’s greatness’. On television, the final Conservative election broadcast began: ‘Less than five years ago, we in Britain no longer believed we still had any right to think of ourselves as a world leader. But that has changed. Because of one woman …’ Then the Prime Minister herself came on to assure us that ‘If only we have the wisdom and will to grasp the opportunities, Britain can become a world leader once again’. From the Mail to the Sun, her press chorus reverberated to the same theme: Thatcher’s leadership will take us back to national greatness.
Last year, when Margaret Thatcher went to the House of Commons to announce the news of Argentina’s surrender in the Falkland Islands, she told the crowd in Downing Street: ‘Today has put the Great back into Britain.’
How has greatness been put back here in Britain? When did it drop away? What happened to it in the meanwhile? At the time it was easy to understand, or rather to sense what she was doing. She was telling us to feel that Britain is once again a great power. She was inviting us to share a tingling sensation of triumph about British superiority.
People responded with enthusiasm to this rallying cry. Others, perhaps a majority, had a somewhat different reaction. They scoffed at the phrase – they saw it was ridiculous – and yet at the same time their chests swelled a bit with pride. They even smiled at their own reaction as they saw that they too were a little ridiculous. Thus the phrase, like the whole Falklands episode, drew on all sorts of sentiments about British power and skill, and even desire for well being.
It seems to me that there is more to Thatcher’s phrase than enjoyable rhetoric. She really means it: it was a spontaneous, sincere expression of her views, her hopes, indeed of her programme for Britain. And this has consequences which may make people in Britain not only poorer but also more twisted and resentful. Behind the notion of making Britain great again lies the well worn question of Britain’s decline. Margaret Thatcher sees Britain’s decline politically, rather than in terms of the jobs and production that affect our lives so directly. She has praised Victorian ideals. That was the time of British imperialism, when the Empire was the world’s number one p
ower. In her Falklands victory speech last year, the Prime Minister pointed to those who ‘believed that our decline was irreversible – that we could never again be what we once were’; such people, in her words, thought that ‘Britain was no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world.’ The Falklands victory, she continued, shows that they were wrong. ‘The lesson of the Falklands,’ and these are her words, ‘is that Britain has not changed.’ Well, whatever may have remained the same within the United Kingdom, a good deal has changed in the world at large.
For a start, Britannia no longer rules the waves. At the beginning of this century the Royal Navy was twice the size of its nearest rival. Today, the two carriers – the Hermes and the Invincible – that were sent to the Falklands would together fit inside any of America’s larger aircraft carriers, and the United States has fifteen such ships.
Similarly in 1900 Britain produced 20 per cent, one fifth of the whole world’s manufactured products. Today it makes about three per cent.
I don’t emphasise these facts in any partisan sense. The Prime Minister’s dreams may be illusory, but she is far from being the only sleep-walker in the House of Commons. Actually Thatcher should be congratulated for being so explicit. She at least is resolutely backward looking. The others are inclined to a politics of reminiscence. Michael Foot looks to 1945. The Social Democrats – being much the most modern – are inclined towards 1955, with perhaps a touch of ’68. Little wonder that many find it refreshing when Margaret Thatcher has the boldness to set her sights on 1900.
More important still, every time that the Prime Minister lauds British greatness, she speaks also for her predecessors from both parties. She sums up in her phrase the entire direction of British government since World War Two.
*
In 1945 the Labour Party took office with a large majority. Its Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, proclaimed that it would be a government ‘… at the centre of a great Empire and Commonwealth of nations which touches all parts of the world’. He was the master builder at the time. The architect was Churchill even though he was in opposition. In 1948 Churchill described the three overlapping circles of British interest: the English speaking North Atlantic community, the Empire and Commonwealth that stretched around the globe, and Europe with its Mediterranean. In Churchill’s words, Britain alone stands at the juncture of all three, and keeps them together. Like Churchill’s paintings, this is a colourful, post-impressionist fantasy. Yet it remains to this day the governing image of British Foreign policy.
When Churchill took office again as Prime Minister in 1951, he declared: ‘We have to cast away by an effort of will the enfeebling tendencies and fallacies of Socialism and to free ourselves from restrictive Socialist rule, to stand erect once more and take our place among the great powers of the world. Never must we lose our faith and our courage, never must we fail in exertion and resolve.’ It was pretty silly then: how much more so now.
Churchill’s chosen successor was Anthony Eden. During the war Eden had told the Cabinet, ‘We have to maintain our position as an Empire and a Commonwealth. If we fail to do so we cannot exist as a world power.’ As Prime Minister, he was to order the invasion of Suez in 1956 in an effort to secure this goal, and it was a fisaco.
But even so, Harold Macmillan, who took over from Eden, still pretended that Britain was one of the ‘Big Three’. When Dean Acheson – a much celebrated American Secretary of State – said that Britain had lost an Empire but had yet to find a role, he was publicly rebuked by Macmillan, Acheson’s observation was a truism. Yet our Prime Minister felt obliged to condemn it. In general, it was Macmillan’s view that Britain was Greece to America’s Rome.
Douglas-Home followed Macmillan; he was the fourth successive Tory Prime Minister. He summed up his own view when he justified retaining nuclear weapons. We have to have them, Home said, in order to ‘keep Britain’s place at the top table’.
Labour came back to office in 1964. It was supposed to be a modernising administration. But Harold Wilson put his attitude in a nutshell: ‘We are a world power and a world influence or we are nothing.’ Nothing?
It might be thought that at least Edward Heath modernised British policy, even if Wilson didn’t. And it is true that Heath changed something. In Churchill’s perspective of the three circles America came first and Europe last. Heath reversed these priorities. But he did so within the same preoccupation. We have to get into Europe, said Heath, ‘if we want to remain Great Britain and take the chance of becoming Greater Britain.’
Perhaps we should pass over the rest of the seventies with a decent silence. I have done enough to show that Thatcher’s celebration of the Empire and British greatness is not exceptional, rather it expresses the desire of all post-war Prime Ministers. For them, the key problem of Britain’s decline has not been the relative impoverishment of our standard of life, but the need to ‘stay great’. They would rather dine at top table on their knees – while being fed scraps from US armament programmes – than sit in suitable, and quite substantial comfort with the ordinary countries of the world.
Wilson’s knees were slippery and they shook, Thatcher’s are cast in iron and she kneels bolt upright. To emphasise how much they have in common we need only look to another authority; Lord Franks: he who was brought forth to investigate the causes of the Falklands War and found that no government had done anything for which it should be criticised; the man whom The Times recently declared would be our President if we did not happen to have a Queen. When he gave his 1954 Reith Lectures, Franks thought that the Commonwealth ‘enables us to play in the big league with the Great Powers’. But more than that, he emphasised the fundamental party consensus that guided foreign and economic policy in Britain after 1945. Both parties shared the same fundamental national principle – or as I would say delusion – namely: ‘Britain is going to continue to be what she has been, a Great Power.’
*
Thirty years later we know that it did not work. But today there is still a deep-seated reluctance to confront this and widespread uncertainty over what should be done next. Let me give you an example. When the Guardian published an extract from my book, in which I criticise the Falklands war, a gentleman was kind enough to write to me to explain that for his part he agreed with a statement by Nigel Lawson, the then Energy Minister, whom I had quoted. Lawson said that the Falklands victory meant the re-birth of Britain, a sentiment I regard as absurd. My correspondent explained that he was not and had never been a Conservative. But he was heartily sick of our apparent decline and inability to defend our interests, including our standard of living: ‘when Argentina invaded the Falklands the time had come to call enough is enough.’ I responded, and tried to say that on the contrary I thought the dispatch of the Task Force to be merely one more wasteful episode in the same old story. He replied with courtesy: ‘I fear you are right that it will not stop this country’s decline, I wish I knew what would.’
I have told you about this small exchange because of those last words. The sigh that they express, the desire for something lost: ‘I wish I knew what would.’ Is this just imperialist nostalgia? For some certainly. But for many others there is also a sympathetic element, a grieving for a time when workmanship and substance and economic growth were part of this island’s life. And when people assert – and it was not only Thatcher – that today ‘we have put the Great back into Britain’, they exploit these often confused and well meaning desires, in order to gain endorsement for a bullying and despicable grandeur that has no real substance.
My response is to say, ‘It is time to take the great out of Britain.’ In answer to my correspondent, I’d now put it like this: it is only by taking the great out of Britain that we can reverse Britain’s decline. If that sounds like a paradox it is because of the need to make a distinction between two types of decline, a distinction rarely made in the many tedious speeches and books turned out upon the question. The two have gone on side by side, the one from
being a great power, the other from being a competitive manufacturing economy. However, as I see it, there is also a relationship between them.
First, the fall from Empire and Great Power status. This was not due to any internal failure of will or spirit here at home. It was simply an inevitable consequence of the rest of the world catching up. It is obvious that when states the size of America and the Soviet Union get going, with all their resources and population, that Britain cannot equal them. Hence the ridiculousness of Lord Franks’ idea that we can ‘play in the same league’ as these continental powers. In the hierarchy of world power, Britain was bound by now to be a second rank – if still a substantial – nation state. In so far as there has been a loss of nerve, it has stemmed from the inability to confront this and genuinely accept it, and to transform our institutions accordingly.
The consequence of this failure is that the United Kingdom has in addition sunk into being a relatively impoverished country compared to its equivalents in Western Europe. This is the second but this time unnecessary decline. It can be illustrated quite simply. At the start of the 1950s Winston Churchill warned the country against joining Europe. He said that we had to protect our superior standard of living. There ought to be a principle of levelling up, he argued, not levelling down. He meant that they on the continent had to come up to us and that we should not allow ourselves to be taken down to their, lower, standard of life. Today, however, the standard of living in West Germany and France is substantially higher than Britain’s. It is difficult to generalise, but it is perhaps even a quarter to half as good again.
There is no need to exaggerate. We have not gone back to the thirties. Real wages have risen steadily in the past decades. Quite a few people are doing very well. But given the position Britain had in 1950, there is no doubt that it could have done much better economically.
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