Who Dares Wins: Britain in the Age of the Falklands | History Extra podcast on Acast
"'When Mrs. Thatcher became prime minister, one of the questions that the press often asked her was, what are you going to wear? Because of course, there had never been a woman Prime Minister and there was no established uniform for a woman leader, as there was for men. In 1980, she gave an interview to the news the world who asked her where she got her underwear. Marks and Spencers, it turns out. Who chose her clothes and all the rest of it? Why don't you wear slacks?, the interviewer asked, I think you'd look super in slacks and Mrs. Thatcher's answer was that she didn't think her cabinet colleagues would like it. And she was probably right.
Resistance to women in trousers is a very good sort of small, but extremely suggestive example of how Britain in the early 80s was poised between past and and future. So in 1978, the headmaster of a comprehensive school, just outside Reading, had to corral nine women teachers in the classroom because they had dared to turn up to teach in trousers. You had to incarcerate them, presumably for the safety of their impressionable charges. They won their case and got to wear trousers, but in 1980, as late as 1983, a crematorium in Mrs. Thatcher's own constituency, Finchley, sacked a female employee because she had turned up to work in a trouser suit. The manager of the crematorium explained that trousers on women were akin to see through blouses and that grieving families would be shocked by them and the tribunal found in the crematorium’s favor. And the, the woman did lose her job. And Mrs. Thatcher herself was well aware of this. She was under intense pressure to an extent that we often forget precisely because she was a woman. As The Sun put it in 1979, who would want a dowdy female fatty for Prime Minister? After all, if a person can't control her weight, doesn't it occur to everybody that she may not be able to control other more important things? And this stuff was absolutely standard. In the first half of the 1980s
Just think about the nicknames that people used about Mrs Thatcher on the floor of the House of Commons. The great she-elephant, Attila the Hen, the Catherine the Great of Finchley, the Maggie Taller, and above all, that bloody woman. And if you think that things have changed, just reflect on the song that was chosen by her critics that was propelled up the charts after she died in 2013. Ding Dong, the witch is dead.'...
‘For many people, this was the age above all of mass unemployment. So when Mrs. Thatcher became Prime Minister, it's a myth that she singlehandedly ended full employment, because when she became Prime Minister, the dole queues were already about one to one and a half million people long. And the unemployment of the 1980s, it's now clear in retrospect, was part of a much greater trend, going back to the 1970s and having its roots in two huge seismic changes.
One of them globalization and the advent of so many products from abroad, and the other the end of heavy industry, the end of steelmaking, coal mining, shipbuilding and so on. The industries on which much of kind of working class Britain had been based for the previous 200 years. The second obvious point to make about all this is that it was much worse in Britain in the early 80s, than it was anywhere else. And a lot of that is to do with Mrs Thatcher's economic policy. She was determined to squeeze inflation out of the system. By doing so, by raising interest rates and by pushing up the value of the pound, she made British exports, exorbitantly expensive, destroying the British export industry. And effectively, in manufacturing terms, we lost about 25% of our manufacturing capacity between 1979 and 1982, a decline that no other western country has ever suffered so quickly.
So, partly because of that, Mrs. Thatcher became a scapegoat for, for this sort of huge, structural change. She cast herself as a scapegoat, of course, because she was so strident. Precisely because she was so confrontational, it was very easy to see her, as Time magazine effectively does here on the right, as the person or the architect of so many job losses. As another dimension to it, I think, many of the jobs that went were in traditionally male-dominated industries. I mentioned steelmaking, coal mining, shipbuilding, carmaking, and so on. These were jobs done by men, and many of the people who lost their jobs were men. And when they looked at Downing Street, they saw a middle class Tory woman who had no real empathy for their way of life, the landscape that they found familiar, the values with which they had grown up, so it was easy for them, to, to blame her personally.
But that's very unusual in a, in a, in an international context. France, for example, has suffered pretty similar levels of unemployment since the beginning of the 1980s when you step back and you look at the last 30 years or so. Indeed, and youth unemployment in France has been far higher than in Britain for the past 20 years. But nobody ever says Jacques Chirac, Francois Hollande, cackle in Elysee Palace as they as they look at the latest unemployment figures. So in this as in so much else,
I think the fact that Mrs. Thatcher was a woman is absolutely central to her reputation. And the third thing to say about it is we know now that this was not uniquely British. But people didn't know that then, because this was, this happened in Britain, Dole Queue Britain, says the Daily Mirror. This happened in Britain before it happened anywhere else. So at the time, people saw it as part of the broader, specifically British disease. They saw it as part of a narrative of a uniquely British falling from grace, of a systemic national failure that had no counterpart and then the other part of the Western world, and it intensified people's sense of declinism, of a country that had fallen from grace since the high point of the Second World War.
And this sense of decline and ungovernability peaked in the summer of 1981. So this is Brixton. You had the riots in Brixton first, and then in Toxteth and Mosside, the most vicious rioting of the 20th century, followed by copycat rioting in towns and cities across the country. There was even a petrol bomb thrown in Cirencester of all places...
And all of this, I think contributed to a wider sense of breakdown, of a kind of society becoming unglued, of a disease that was as much moral, cultural, as it was political and economic. And if you look at the press coverage, I talked in my book a little bit about the the press coverage of the riots of the summer of 1981. This sense of introspection, and almost self loathing is extraordinarily pronounced. What is happening to our country? says the Daily Express. Having been one of the most law abiding countries in the world, a byword for stability, order and decency, are we changing into something else? The Times ran a huge editorial, where are we going? We might no longer have an empire, it says. It's interesting how often this comes up. We may no longer be the workshop of the world, we may even have difficulty in paying our way. But one of the qualities upon which we've been accustomed to pride ourselves as British people, has been the orderliness of our way of life'...
'If you think about it, the Falklands is now almost exactly poised between our present moment in 2019 and the end of the Second World War. And many of the people involved in the Falklands War, vividly remembered the Second World War and they made sense of the war in the Falklands by fitting it into a Second World War narrative. So when Michael Foot, the leader of the Labour Party, was asked by some of his colleagues, why do you so keenly support the Falkands War, which he did? His answer was, he said, I know a fascist when I see one. And the way that the press and the politicians described the Argentine regime was as the heirs to the Nazis. Was as a fascist military regime that murdered its own people and must be resisted, because if you appease dictators, they'll carry on and they'll get away with it.
And in a way, this was a war perfectly designed for a generation that had grown up with the Dambusters and Dad's Army. So the sight of the ships pulling out of Southampton and Portsmouth docks, the great Armada plowing through the South Atlantic towards its destination, the landings at San Carlos with their sort of overtones of D Day, as you see in this sort of another Time Magazine cover, even abroad, this is how people are making sense of the war. And then the images of the little figures with their massive packs, trudging across the green moorland landscape to rescue an island population that have been seized by a fascistic foreign power. It all seems like a, basically a replay of 1940. And that I think, partly explains why this was so extraordinarily popular.
So from the very beginning, about eight out of 10 people strongly approved of the decision to fight for the Falklands. Indeed, four out of 10 people thought the government was too slow to fight, it should have fought straight away. And three out of 10 people wanted Britain to attack mainland Argentina itself, and conceivably invade it, which was something that even Mrs. Thatcher would have thought, a little bit too belligerent.
And it's striking to me how much that debate about the Falklands anticipates the debates that we're very familiar with today. There's a wonderful book, published in the summer of 1982, called authors take sides on the Falklands... Anyone who knows authors will know, authors are the worst people to ask about major political and international events, but they did it anyway. And the authors all respond, what's great about it is the authors respond exactly as you would expect, they would.
Say for example, Kingsley Amos thinks that even being asked the question is a sign of left wing limp wristed bias, on the part of the author, of the compilers of the book, because it's so obvious that we should fight for the Falklands. Whereas let's say Salman Rushdie wrote that the war was “xenophobic militarism, the politics of the Victorian nursery, if somebody pinches you, take your trousers down and thrash them”. So he felt ashamed, ashamed by the response of the British people and it was a sign of how backward and how xenophobic and all the rest of it, they were. And you can see in these sort of debates, Kingsley on one side and Salman Rushdie on the other, the outline of a debate that we're apparently trapped in now and forever...
The Economist, the week after the Argentines surrendered, said that the war had been a cultural revolution, marking the end of the 1960s... Tony Benn wrote in his diary, I feel that some, that was a real turning point in politics. I feel we've come to the end of an era… Enoch Powell put it rather differently. A change has come about in Britain, he wrote in the Sunday Express that weekend, we are ourselves again. And among people who supported the war, of course, that was precisely how they felt…
[Defeat would lead to, in] Mrs Thatcher's own words, that sense of being just another European country would have been intensified, people would have said, well, we know we, we were humiliated at Suez, we've been humiliated again in the South Atlantic, it's perfectly clear now that our days of being a great power are behind us. We are just another European country. And as a result, our future lies squarely in Europe. So I'll leave you with this thought. Perhaps it was here in the spring of 1982, as the task force returned to a tumultuous welcome, that the road to Brexit began'"
Of course, many of the ones who judged Thatcher especially harshly and celebrated her death in 2013 were... feminists
Left wing logic: if someone invades your country and you fight back, you are xenophobic and shameful. And we are still told that liberals don't hate their countries
