The Falklands: two sides to the story.

 The "comment" by Anonymous to the previous post deserves more than a comment in reply.

Anonymous, and I suspect most people in the UK, see the Falklands War as a source of national pride – putting the “Great” back into Great Britain (which is actually a geographical term, nothing to do with political eminence).

But there’s another side of the story .  

Britian's title to the Falklands, which was claimed as a Crown Colony in 1841, was always a bit dubious,  and disputed by Argentina from the beginning. 

For some years before 1982, when the war took place,  the Britain's Foreign Office had been toying with various options, such as joint sovereignty with Argentine, to extract us from sole responsibility for the Islands.

When the Defence Secretary,  John Nott,  announced in 1981 that HMS Endurance, the only British naval presence in the South Atlantic, was to be withdrawn, the Argentine government , anxious to distract attention from its domestic problems, decided Britain was no longer too bothered about the area and decided to put a toe in the water by organising an allegedly civilian occupation of South Georgia.

Mrs Thatcher certainly showed admirable guts, grit and determination in organising and sticking with her Task Force which would,  of course, been unnecessary but for the wrong signals sent out by  proposed  withdrawal of the Endurance. During the voyage out,  opportunities for a diplomatic compromise were proposed but  these were turned down, and the war was won by  Britain with the human cost of 255 British and 649 Argentinian deaths, most of the latter teenage conscripts.

Mrs Thatcher received her reward in two subsequent election victories.    But the problem remains and the diplomatic solution which the Foreign Office were seeking in the 1970s is still being sought and will eventually be achieved.

To me, after the deaths, innumerable other casualties, post conflict suicides and traumatic stress disorder, the part of the “adventure”  I found then and still find most  distressing is the re- emergence of jingoism – exemplified by the Sun’s “Gotcha” and “Up yours, Galtieri”  headlines.  I thought that, with the demise of the Boys Own Paper and the  post Second World War literature and comic strips on which I fed as a child and adolescent (Achtung!  Schweinhund!) we had grown out of that.  

 Alas no (and I suspect some of it remains and will flavour the Brexit debate)

It’s instructive  to compare our reaction to the Falklands to our supine (but sensible) handing over of Hong Kong to China.  We were fed the myth that the colony was only on a 99 year lease so we were legally obliged to hand it over.  

 But that was not true.  The 99 year lease applied to the New Territories (on the mainland)  but not to the island of Hong Kong, which was  a Crown Colony  and to which Britain had a much stronger title than to the Falklands.

Wisely, Mrs Thatcher sent no task-force to the South China Seas:  instead Chris Patten was sent to haul down the flag. 

 Bullies only enforce their principles when the adversary is weak.