Iron Britannia

by Anthony Barnett

  Why the failure? Because politically we, I would prefer to say ‘they’, tried to do too much. The country would have been better off had it not been for futile attempts to remain a Great Power. This is, if you like, a decisive cause of the British disease. It follows that the Falklands war is not, as Thatcher claims, the cure for decline but rather a symptom that the disease has reached a new stage: delirium.

  Should I speak so harshly about the Falklands? What about feelings of the bereaved families and the need to respect the dead? Indeed, we must show consideration here. But we also have a responsibility to the living and to those who may die as the conflict continues. There is more than enough experience here from Cyprus to Ireland. Ever since the Second World War, Britain has been trying to have its cake and eat it, something symbolised for me by Churchill’s three circles.

  It is usually said that Britain has adapted painlessly to the loss of Empire. This is not true. It has been agony, especially for our rulers. The Labour Party has suffered from it acutely. For example, when Harold Wilson led Labour back to power in 1964, he had a programme to galvanise the British economy. But he sacrificed it in order to save the pound from devaluation, in a hopeless effort to keep high the value of sterling as a world trading currency. It was a catastrophic misjudgement. Wilson destroyed what was possible – British participation in the boom years of expansion – in an effort to do something impossible, in which, naturally, he failed. Crossman captured this in a diary entry from 1967. He noted that Labour’s foreign policy was ‘totally ineffective’ due to the fact that Wilson based it ‘on an image of himself as a maker of world policy’.

  However, we can’t just blame Labour for having policies which were so very Conservative. It was Churchill who established the lines of approach after 1945. It was the Conservatives themselves who, when the Common Market was formed, failed completely to see the necessity for membership when the advantages were overwhelming, providing you were reconciled to abandoning fantasies about ‘imperial greatness’.

  Now we have seen a fantastic repeat of this lopsided approach to our affairs. Last year thousands of millions of pounds were spent to save a community of 1,400 Falklanders. In the process Britain sacrificed hundreds of dead and maimed and thereby committed itself to the costs of retaining a deep water navy with a global reach. In the same year 600,000 men and women were thrown out of work, which means that dozens of communities the size of Port Stanley were devastated here in the United Kingdom. A fraction of the wealth invested in the Task Force could have kept many of them productive. Yet we are told that we can do nothing about such things: No subsidies here because, the government tells us, we must take the State off our backs.

  What is the result? £16,000 million pounds a year are now being spent on paying out dole money – the most wasteful and humilating form of subsidy that there is.

  We should try to be clear about this. There have certainly been many jobs in structurally obsolete plants and mines that have had to go, with due compensation to those involved. This is a human tragedy. Yet who can deny that some of our local economies have become hopelessly anachronistic in today’s world? One such is the Falklands Islands with its declining sheep farms.

  But it is far from being the case that all the recent manufacturing centres which have closed in Britain have been Port Stanleys. Many companies needed only a lower rate of interest on their normal overdrafts to be viable (for they had orders at hand). Purposive support, cheaper than the Armada, could have kept many in business. You can see the irrationality, it is obvious. It used to be possible to satirise such foolishness, but now the bitterness and hurt is itself becoming too grotesque to laugh at. Furthermore, this contrast is far from being the only or even the most important imbalance between national needs and international obsessions. Sums of money far vaster than those spent on the Falklands adventure flow abroad to be invested overseas. It is government policy to back the financial markets rooted in the City’s long standing commitment to its world rule.

  So if you, or anyone in your family, or among your friends, or their children, are unwaged, then they are part of the price ticket for making Britain great again. How does the rip-off work? It is not just due to the popularity and charisma of the Prime Minister, although apparently that helps.

  There is also the weakness of the opposition. Michael Foot wants to take Britain out of the Common Market, and combines his little Englandism with applause for the dispatch of the Task Force because we must defend people’s freedoms ‘throughout the world’. His is a benign version of British Greatness. I do not blame Foot any more than Thatcher. It is the shared presumption of the institutional world that they cohabit which provides the encouragement for their views.

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  As a socialist I have perhaps an especially radical distance from Britain’s very backward looking institutions. I want to see a socialist democracy in which not only would we all have jobs but also we would have an effective say in what we do and make. There would be obligations to the community but we would be liberated from the dictation of multinational companies and state bureaucracies alike. Such a democracy is clearly inconceivable without a different sort of national sovereignty.

  But it is also the case, or so it seems to me, that an effective and dynamic capitalism which delivers jobs and wealth here at home at least equal to that in Europe is unlikely to come about until the national political order is shaken from the legacy of the nineteenth century. Even as a socialist I can see the need for a better capitalism.

  Just imagine: we have the chance to suggest to our political leaders what they might do. So we say to them, ‘please put aside everything else and lead the way to our achieving by the year 2000 the standard of living of Holland, which also once ruled a major Empire.’ This would mean nearly doubling per capita gross national product in 17 years, a major undertaking. It is not difficult to imagine their response to such a request. ‘Holland,’ they would say, aghast. ‘But we are world leaders. We concern ourselves with the fate of Gibraltar and Hong Kong. We must deter the Soviet Union. Our national essence goes far beyond the confines of a miserable north European state’. Or, as a journal of British conservatism recently put it, we have discovered that our foreign policy in the south Atlantic has an overwhelming importance compared to the ‘pettifogging debate of economists’.

  You are not convinced? I’ll be more theoretical. What should be the guiding principle of foreign policy for any state? In general to provide for and protect the happiness, the freedoms, the peacefulness and the economic well-being of its inhabitants: to ensure in the fullest sense the creative self-determination of its people. Yet it is surprising how rarely this note is struck by British statesmen. For them Foreign Policy involves big, strategic questions, on a far grander canvas than this ‘small island’.

  For that is how they see us. Lord Franks made it clear enough. He wrote that there was no need to argue about being committed to Britain’s continuing greatness. For ‘what is this small island with its fifty million inhabitants if it tries to go it alone?’ We should have to be an off-shore island of Europe, a prospect he found intolerable.

  ‘What is this small island?’ this note of contempt, almost denigration, can be found repeatedly in talks about Britain by its own appointed representatives. It is not a judgement of realism, it is rather the premiss for saying that Britain is insufficient for their own personal greatness.

  What is this small island? Well, it is a very pleasant one. It is off Europe, a part of Europe. It has over fifty million inhabitants: us. We are quite a substantial and convenient number, English, both white and black, Scots and Welsh but with many other variations of regions and creeds. For whom is this not good enough?

  The answer is that it is not good enough for those who look elsewhere to see the proof of British worth and Britain’s world standing. And they are at the helm. And while they are at the helm and are set upon a course that steers for greatness, then what is good in Britain stands condemned.
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  Perhaps you nod your head in agreement. But what we have learnt in the past year is that this obsession with greatness is deeply rooted in a great machinery of tradition and interests. To take the Great out of Britain is much easier said than done. All the more reason then to do it.

  How Thatcher Used the Falklands to win the 1983 Election

  This was written after the 1983 general election for a suggested second edition of Iron Britannia that didn’t make it. It has not been previously published.

  Her victory in the Falklands War transformed Thatcher from one of the least liked to one of the most admired prime ministers in the history of British opinion polls. Thereafter her immediate aim was to transform the gains of military popularity into an electoral extension of her term of office. She was helped by the extraordinary power given to prime ministers in the UK, namely that they can declare an election at any time of their own choosing within their party’s five-year tenure of office. They therefore seek to manipulate events so as to stage an election to maximise their own advantage.

  The electorate, however, prefers not to be too blatantly manipulated. It remains important to ‘play the game’. The prime minister’s power to call elections is arbitrary and therefore inherently undemocratic. It is a privilege that demands to be abused. But it must not be seen to be abused; such are the ways of England. Call me cynical, but the game is hardly innocent – you play it to make it seem that the election has been forced on you by circumstances, so that you do not appear to be cashing in on what might be a short-lived wave of popularity while in fact you do just that.

  For Thatcher in 1983 there was an added hurdle to overcome: she also had to avoid any appearance of blatantly exploiting the nation’s sacrifice in the Falklands for partisan advantage while doing just that.

  In both respects she succeeded brilliantly. She cashed in her success in the Falklands War and the popularity of the leadership she displayed during it, to the full and without ill effects. But just as with the war itself, she pulled this off because the other political parties played into her hands while the media lent her its support. How she gained her victory provides a fascinating study of contemporary London politics.

  In addition to the fact that an overt or hurried attempt to profit immediately from the war might have backfired, Thatcher needed a delay for two reasons: one tactical, the other connected with her conduct over the Falkland Islands themselves. Tactically, a Boundary Commission had been established to redraw the lines of the parliamentary constituencies, so as to take account of population shifts. Its recommendations would tend to equalise the size of each voting area. This would benefit the Conservative Party, as Labour had accumulated strongholds in inner-city and industrial zones whose population had considerably diminished. The Commission’s report was due to be published at the end of 1982. It would be to the advantage of the Tories to hold an election only after the new boundaries had been agreed. Also due at the end of the year was the Franks Report, the official investigation of the causes of the war. As Thatcher bore, arguably more than any other single individual at the British end, personal responsibility for the conflict, the Franks Report’s conclusions could be decisive for her future. To go to the country prior to its publication might seem to prejudge its findings. Certainly such an action would have exposed her to opposition charges that she feared the report’s conclusions.

  So Thatcher had to wait. By the end of 1982, however, the Boundary Commission published its recommendations and these would be endorsed by Parliament as soon as Labour’s attempt to delay them by legal action had been dismissed. More important, Thatcher had been given an advance copy of the Franks Report in which she was exculpated from any responsibility for the conflict.

  On New Year’s Day 1983 she was questioned by reporters – would this be the year of an election? She replied that she would not even consider it … at the moment. ‘I shall not think about it’, she declared, ‘until after I have been in for four years.’ In retrospect it is clear that this response was very carefully thought out!

  The fourth anniversary of her term of office would fall in May 1983. The formula – not to ‘think’ of an election until then – gave her and her organisers four months in which to excite election fever and probe electoral opinion. It allowed Thatcher to refuse to rule out an election, while simultaneously stimulating and encouraging the idea of one, yet retaining a face-saving option of not calling an election should the auguries fail to remain auspicious.

  The New Year began for Thatcher with one great advantage: she knew that the Franks Report would find in her favour. She promptly doubled the gain by paying a surprise visit to the Falklands. There, her sudden appearance before tiny knots of incoherent islanders, recorded by television, provided a wonderfully crafted reminder of her best images. Thatcher was projected back on the news programmes as grieving mother (as she bowed her head before the memorials to the dead), firm and compassionate sovereign (as she spoke to her grateful, liberated subjects) and victorious war leader (as, with a regal scarf over her hair, she pinned medals to our servicemen). British opinion obediently followed its teleprompt and Thatcher’s ratings, which had dipped slightly after the excitement of the conflict, rose once more.

  There was now only one serious possibility that might deprive her of a Falklands themed re-election: the parliamentary debate over the Franks Report. The Prime Minister decided to both open and conclude the debate for the government side, a sign of her distrust of her senior colleagues. What was at stake, as she well knew, was her opponents’ last chance to nail her for having permitted the debacle of Argentina’s successful invasion in the first place. The Falklands War was decisive in Thatcher’s 1983 electoral victory not because she repossessed the islands as such; these remain of remote concern, if that, to almost the totality of the population of Britain. It was because elections are about who governs and can therefore be made to focus on the quality of leadership. Thatcher had demonstrated a capacity for firmness and steadfastness during the war when so many of her predecessors and colleagues seemed vacillating. It was this, not retaining the islands themselves, that made her seem electorally attractive, especially when the main opposition party was led by Michael Foot, Labour’s answer to Rufus T. Firefly.

  But Thatcher remained vulnerable as leader in one respect. Before the conflict she had insisted on the naval cuts which then led to the decision that she personally insisted on to withdraw the Endurance from its patrol off the Falklands. Yet she had also overruled those who wanted to negotiate an agreement on sovereignty with Argentina, for example in terms of a leaseback that protected the islanders. It was thanks to her that Britain sought to retain but not defend the Falklands – an irresponsible policy that permitted the conflict through negligence and false economy. It was a policy that would have condemned her – and obliged her to resign – had the war been lost. The opposition knew this and therefore retained a chance to damage her key asset: for the ability to win a war is clearly less admirable in those with a propensity to start them by reckless mistakes.

  Thatcher herself was well aware that she was vulnerable in any argument over who was responsible in the first place. Her claim to foresight and good government could be skewered and her firmness shown to be stupidity. The Commons debate on the Franks Report was the opposition’s last chance to expose her on this. As Michael Foot waffled on it became increasingly certain that she would have a second term.

  The debate took place at the end of January. In February one of Thatcher’s trusted personal secretaries was told that she could not take her holiday in June.1 In the next three months, ‘the PM decided to give a whole spate of television and radio interviews’.2 In many of these public appearances, she emphatically kept her options ‘open’ with regard to ‘her thoughts’ about an early election – the thoughts that she would not allow herself to think until May. Meanwhile, in April Thatcher’s personal image-maker from her 1979 election, Gordon Reece, arrived from California. As he was Vice-President of Oc
cidental Petroleum, we can be confident that he did not appear at a moment’s notice. According to one source, when Reece returned to London, ‘close observers of the political scene knew that a June election was a virtual certainty’.3

  As the date for an announcement neared, speculation was insufficiently agitated. So in an address to the CBI, Thatcher provocatively mocked the rumours to give them added credence. ‘Maggie may!’ she taunted, as she flaunted the possibility that Maggie might not. The press reacted like a client on the cheap to this display of an ankle. The prospect that she might ‘not’ was unbearable. A great gnashing of editorials could be heard: she was being indecisive, the uncertainty was bad for the country, we must get it over with! Instead of exposing her brazen effort to force an early Falklands election, or simply demand that she end uncertainty by declaring there would be no election until 1984, the leader writers and commentators rolled over. They made it legitimate for Thatcher to declare that, for once, this time, she agreed with them; yes, they were right, she might have to end the ‘uncertainty’ for the sake of the nation.

  The version according to Thatcher went as follows: there were local government elections on Thursday 5 May (a useful barometer of party support). This was followed by a meeting at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country house, on Sunday 8 May. It was now four years since her 3 May 1979 election victory. For the first time she was finally ‘allowed’ to think about calling an early election. How fortunate that she had just had a meeting with all prospective Tory candidates.4 For nine hours her ministers and advisers tried their best to persuade her that the uncertainty was damaging the country. With great reluctance, the Prime Minister concurred. She did not want anybody to think that she might ‘cut and run’. So she wrestled with the decision and returned to London, where she slept on it. Then at breakfast when it still seemed the right thing to do she moved with her legendary swiftness and a dissolution was announced.