It’s hard to believe that 30 years have passed since the needless and highly emotional Falklands War, the conflict that saved Margaret Thatcher from what appeared to be almost certain electoral defeat at the end of a brutal first term as Conservative Prime Minister.  


Faced with rising unemployment and civil unrest, the ‘Iron Lady’ reached for what so many unpopular politicians around the globe have done for centuries and managed to fashion a war to get the country behind her, giving the flag-waving ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ mob something to be proud of. First though, she had to find someone to fight and then be sure she could successfully finish whatever she started.

 
When the half-witted General Galtieri decided to lay claim to the Falkland Islands not so very far from the coast of his football-mad South American nation of Argentina, Thatcher and her cohorts suddenly realised they had been handed an open goal and rushed to step up and put the Argies away. I vividly remember watching a news bulletin at the time when a BBC reporter asked a sample of people going about their daily business if they had ever heard of the Falkland Islands, and if they had, where were they? The few that had heard of them thought they were in the Caribbean or somewhere near the Canary Islands! 

 
The rest is history. The Task Force steamed 14,000 kilometres to defend the rocky outcrop where sheep outnumbered the human inhabitants by 10 to 1, and where, (by general consensus), the less than 3000 islanders were somewhat like the land on which they eeked out a living; remote, rugged and often inhospitable. Battles at Goose Green and Mount Tumbledown cost British military lives together with a great many more on the Argentinan side, most of whom were inadequately trained conscripts. 

 
Whilst the sinking of the General Belgrano remains the biggest stain on her bloodlust-filled reputation for which millions, like me, hated Margaret Thatcher – reports (by the way), leaked some years later confirmed that  the Argentine ship had surrendered and was steaming away from the scene of the military action when Thatcher insisted on it being torpedoed with the ensuing loss of 323 lives – but the fact remains that the victory ensured she would gain another term in office, which eventually stretched to a marathon 12-year stint at the helm of British politics. Looking back 30 years, I still recall people wondering why on earth Britain was putting our soldiers’ lives at risk for land that surely had nothing to do with us and was an outdated relic of the British imperialist past.

 
Now, all of a sudden, as the 30th anniversary of the war has arrived, the current democratically elected Argentine leadership has lost no time in resurrecting their claim to the islands they call ‘Las Malvinas’, and frankly, I believe they have a great deal more of a right to the Falklands than do the Brits, for whom defending the island and keeping a permanent military presence has been a massive cost to the British taxpayer for three decades. The possibility of crude oil being found in the South Atlantic seas around the Falklands however is undoubtedly the main interest the British have in holding on this land after having given away Hong Kong, all their nations in Africa and the Caribbean, not to mention India and many more, without too much of a struggle. All of a sudden, David Cameron has sent a destroyer to patrol the waters in a thinly veiled provocation towards the ‘old enemy’. A huge fan of Mrs T, maybe ‘our Dave’ is attempting to fashion his own Falklands skirmish to distract attention amongst the masses as austerity bites back home. 
 

 
The reason I draw attention to the British government’s “outrage” at the ‘bloody foreigners’ claim to the land 14,000 kilometres from London and  only 700 kilometres from Argentine soil, is that I find it somewhat galling and the height of hypocrisy when Britain attempts to take the moral high-ground and tell Israel exactly what we should be doing with land that we actually live on day-to-day and don’t administer from the other side of the world! Are the British really in any position to lecture to Israel, (or the Palestinians for that matter), on how they should settle land disputes when they refuse to even negotiate or consider handing back land that they clearly have no moral right to, no historical claim over, and that is only theirs because they insist they were the first to land on the rocky backwater back in the 1690’s, although both the Spanish and the Portuguese repeatedly suggest they found it first?

 
Argentina has decided to take its case to the UN and unlike 1982 is heading to New York with the support of most of South and Latin America, just for starters. The British intransigence and pig-headedness about land that has absolutely no bearing on the day-to-day life of 99.99% of British citizens, shows just how two-faced they are, something that should be thrown back at them time and again when they insist on lecturing to Israel about how they should define borders of a piece of land, home to more than seven million people that is barely the size of Wales, and whose collective ancestors have tilled the dusty soil for as many as 4000 years.

 
Surely this is just another brazen case so ably encapsulated in the well known words of the 17th century English academic John Selden, who wrote in his novel Table Talk of 1654, that preachers are often guilty of insisting, “Do as I say,
not as I do”.

1 Comment