By San Carlos Water

Letters

Vol. 5 No. 1 · 10 January 1983

From Anthony Barnett

SIR: In his discussion of Iron Britannia, my book about the causes of the Falklands war on the British side, Neal Ascherson attacks my description of Thatcher’s role (LRB Vol. 4, No 21). He sees me as ‘anxious to deny her the dignity of consciously determining events’, and says that I present her ‘in the left-wing manner as something of a puppet in the hands of greater collective and vaster historical forces. Barnett blames Parliament for insisting, in the fateful debate of 3 April, that she perform the full Churchillist rite.’ There are at least three odd things about this assessment. First, the standard left-wing view is to blame Thatcher for the war, almost personally: an attitude I think I have demonstrated to be inadequate.

Second, Ascherson himself seems to take up in his review precisely the approach that he accuses me of having. He refers to ‘the fact that guilt [sic] lay on the entire political establishment’, and he endorses Peter Jenkins’s view that ‘it was Parliament’s War’ (their emphasis): the phrase itself signals precisely the point that it was not just ‘Thatcher’s War’. Ironically, and this is the third oddity, I caution the reader specifically against taking this attitude too far – the attitude Ascherson himself seems to hold while criticising me for it. I wrote: ‘It can be argued that Thatcher was the prisoner of events … Certainly she could not have grabbed the mantle of Churchill single-handed, such a deed would have been fiercely contested by his other inheritors. But that said she did not need time “to think things out”; it was the kind of issue she wanted all along.’ This is not the description of a mere puppet.

It seems to me that a matter of very great significance is implicit in Ascherson’s approach and should be clarified. The tension in his assessment of Thatcher’s role allows him to assert, as his emphatic conclusion, the pointlessness of the war. This he can only do by dismissing the real significance of Thatcher. For example, he notes that I take as my ‘text’ a speech of Thatcher’s given at Cheltenham after the victory (and after I had finished the first draft of my essay, but never mind). I reproduce the speech in full in an Appendix because it expresses Thatcher’s own bellicose programme here at home, using the Task Force as a symbol. Ascherson dismisses it: ‘On the whole, this was a silly, conventional speech already peeling from memory after a few months: what war leader has not proclaimed that the charge with the bayonet will now become the charge with the spanner … ’ For me Ascherson’s complacency is alarming, because disarming. For a start, I never trust the word ‘silly’ when used in political discourse like this. (I do not think that Thatcher is a Fascist, but how many times was Hitler described as ‘a silly little man’?) At the beginning of my discussion of Thatcherism, after introducing the reader to the themes of the Cheltenham address, I suggest: ‘Thatcher’s South Atlantic programme may appear implausible. But the less such aspirations are taken seriously, the more likely they are to succeed.’ The victory speech was no more ‘silly’ than the Parliamentary debate of 3 April. That is why we have to lake the war seriously, because this is what it was about: it was a war for Britain, not the Falklands. Hence it is fundamentally misleading to conclude, as Ascherson seems to do, that the whole exercise was ‘pointless’. Of course, that was so in terms of the Falklands themselves: the islands were only the excuse for the occasion. (Although, once raised as a central issue, we have to treat them, too, as other than silly.) But the whole point of the war on the British side was to salvage an archaic United Kingdom and its world role, for which most of the population here will continue to suffer. Which is one overriding reason why Britain should not have sent men to their deaths in the South Atlantic.

Anthony Barnett
London WC2