I would be interested about the other two operations.
There is absolutely no doubt that we knew of the scope and extent of Argentine preparations in 1982, our intelligence resources somehow dissappeared?
Why did we completely ignore the so-called ‘scrap merchants’ that had landed on the South Sandwich Islands when they were dressed in Army kit and were flying the Argentine flag, especially when it was touted in the Argentine press as some sort of victory?
The opening scenario for Journeyman was remarkably similar to the 1982 events, yet little was done.
We had a government that was not only going to lose the next election, it was set to be wiped out the electoral map - folk seem to forget just how unpoplular Thatcher was at that time.
There really was no coming back for this administration, not a hope in hell, and yet all too conveniently a readily preventable war came along, with an opponent that was also pretty unpopular and needing to bolster its own position.
Had we carried out another deterrence operation, there would not have been a war, Thatcher would not have been reelected, the Galtieri regime was already weak but might still have been able to sustain itself for some time longer.
Conspiracy, who cares, its done and we live today with the results. If Argentina had held back, there was a reasonable chance that this territory would have been ceded anyway, we didn’t care for it and this showed in our own lack of investment - the Falkand Islanders didn’t even have right of residency in the UK as they did not hold UK passports - each case would have required assessment on its merits.
In the event, we got Thatcher/Reagan axis which played its own part in helping the USSR to collapse - remember the ‘We can do business’ speech?
Stuff happens, stuff changes, and as far as conspiracies go, well governments have done much worse and it passes by, Iraq is a case in point. In terms of geopolitik the Falklands are not really A-list.
I don’t think anyone knows what would have happened at the next election, without the Falklands. It’s true that it increased Thatcher’s popularity, but public sentiment against her and the Tories had already bottomed out at the height of the recession in 1981 and was on the rise before the Falklands situation. The economy had turned before the end of that year, and the Tories had the option of delaying the next election until late 83 or even 84, waiting for things to improve further.
Also, the opposition was divided. Labour had effectively split into two parties. It’s a bit difficult to imagine Michael Foot’s Labour romping home to a majority. Meanwhile, the new SDP enjoyed a honeymoon period but again, I don’t see how it is at all certain that a new, untested political entity would have “wiped out” the Tories.
So yes, I think the next election would have been closer, but I think it’s still possible that the Tories would have won.
This is true, in as much as counterfactual history is pretty difficult to assess.
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It’s true that it increased Thatcher’s popularity, but public sentiment against her and the Tories had already bottomed out at the height of the recession in 1981 and was on the rise before the Falklands situation. The economy had turned before the end of that year, and the Tories had the option of delaying the next election until late 83 or even 84, waiting for things to improve further.
Also, the opposition was divided. Labour had effectively split into two parties. It’s a bit difficult to imagine Michael Foot’s Labour romping home to a majority. Meanwhile, the new SDP enjoyed a honeymoon period but again, I don’t see how it is at all certain that a new, untested political entity would have “wiped out” the Tories.
So yes, I think the next election would have been closer, but I think it’s still possible that the Tories would have won.
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You’re much closer to the mark here in my opinion. I would go further: there have been numerous statistical analyses with respect to voter behaviour at the 1983 UK General Election, and having studied these at university, I would say that the most persuasive of these point towards a Conservative victory in 1983, even absent the Falklands War.
I had to dig into my old files on this - lucky I am working from home today - “Government Popularity and the Falklands War: A Reassessment” is a pretty strong work that looks into voter behaviour at the 1983 election: the strongest estimate that they give the Falklands War in terms of increasing popularity of the Tories was around 5 or 6 per cent (with a middling projection of about 3%), with the effect dissipating quite quickly.
As you correctly point out, the economy was on the upswing by the time the election rolled around and the analysis reckons that this was a far more pervasive (and persuasive) factor when looking at voter behaviour than was the Falklands. The reckoning is that the Falklands was about 4th in predictors of voting behaviour in terms of issues and placed well after the economy, trade union policy and policy on social services (specifically the NHS). There are other factors as well, which were not explicitly measured by the surveys done on voting intention at the time (the extent to which the Gang of Four split the Labour vote being another electorally significant factor).
Other analyses are available - I remember seeing one that argued that it was, at least statistically, significant but that the Falklands still only accounted for at best about 5% of the vote that the Tories got (i.e. 5% of 42.4% not 5% of the total vote) - so a reasonable amount - but assuming an equal split of that vote across all parties, still not enough to prevent a Tory win.
One wonder’s what the outcome of a half-arsed diplomatic spat would’ve been.
If perhaps the UK hadn’t mounted a full task force, or if we went fully down the diplomatic route with a likely compromise agreement.
Never a war? - probable Tory win (as Cumbrian sets out above)
Full-on war and won? - well we know what happened and the UK response can’t have hurt the Tory cause
Full-on war and lost? - pretty disastrous politically I’m sure.
Somewhere in the middle? - I wonder what it would’ve taken to tip things in Labour’s favour.
Anything in your dusty papers about such scenarios Cumbrian? (and full marks to you for having your old stuff to hand, you are either very organised or a compulsive hoarder. I have a vision of you tapping away in little canyon between towering piles of old magazines and un-ironed clothes)
Not in America, it don’t. (Someone else can tell us about the UK.) The mainstream media are simply mainstream media, not liberal media; and Fox News has no LW analogue (no, not even MSNBC); and neither do the Washington Times nor any of the Murdoch papers.
Sorta tangental, but it appears that there is something of a tourism boom in the Falklands-local B&Bs seem to be doing well.
As for the fishing rights-the South Atlantic is now the scene of huge fishery operations (the last oceanic fishery that is not overfished). The FIC is making a ton of money from fishery licensing.
The UK media is also very right-slanted. The Murdoch empire is huge and the Daily Mail even more rabidly right wing.
On the mild liberal left we have the Guardian, which is a serious broadsheet and maybe the Independent, which is a less widely read broadsheet. Among the comics only the Daily Mirror is consistently Labour supporting.
Well, I wound up working in market research, so I kept my old file on Political Statistics, so I’ve always got my references to factor analysis, regressions and and what not, should I need to apply them to the next data set (they’ve been useful on occasion but mostly people want simple stuff rather than things too complicated for man and beast, so when I last moved jobs I brought the file home and left it there rather than dragging it into work). Otherwise, I chucked pretty much everything else away or passed it on to the next bloke when I left uni. Unironed clothes is pretty much bang on the mark though!
Anyway, sadly, there isn’t much in the literature about this to be honest, at least for the stuff that I kept. To say that the Political Statistics module was dry would be an understatement - it’s all basically about what happened and explaining that. Going into the counterfactuals isn’t really discussed (on the grounds that there is no hard data - so what do you put in the model!?!?). One of my other modules was simply entitled British Politics and Government of the 20th Century - which allowed for a little more speculation in this area - but it is little more than that, more just pointing at the stuff that went against them and wondering what might have happened if it had pointed the other way.
To be honest, the two major things were the economy and trade union policy. I would think that the economy would have had to have been appreciably worse - perhaps bordering on another IMF bailout a la the mid 70s - and there would have had to have been an understanding that union problems would be worse under the Tories and much better under Labour (I think, though the Falklands was more recent, it was also more geographically distant for a lot of - non forces -families, whereas the Winter of Discontent was much more close to home). I don’t doubt that a full on defeat in the Falklands would have been unrecoverable for the Tories but once they’d turned the corner on the economy, they were in the box seat - and once Thatcher persuaded people that the unions needed smashing to avoid further Winters of Discontent, it seems people were prepared to put up with the short term pain that the confrontations with the unions would entail.
I realise that we’ve probably got massively off topic. This was all just by way of pointing out that I’m not convinced that the Falklands War was engineered for electoral gain - and if it was, it was bloody stupid, not just for the cost in men but also because it wasn’t a very important electoral factor.
To be honest, speaking as someone born just prior to the original Falklands War, I get the impression that my generation, not remembering the original conflict, attribute limited importance to the Falkland Islands - mostly because we don’t think about them often and when we do, it’s in relation to a war that not many people know very much about (as it’s not taught at secondary school level in the same way as WWI and WWII get drummed into you).
My view of Thatcherism (it should really be called Sir Keith Josephism) is that there is a huge amount of truth that Labour and its unilateral nuclear disarming policy, along with the unions that had held the economy hostage for the previous 15 years were always going to be a massive obstacle.This led to the creation of the SDP and this split the left wing vote. In a ‘first past the post’ electoral system lose by 1% and you are nowhere. Lose a few percent in a split and it can be disastrous.
Despite this, the Conservative approval rating was around 15% in the 2 years prior to the election, and if you go by some sources, its even less than that.
As a diversion, the largely pro financial policies that pretty much wiped out the North and West of the UK industry and started the process of turning Britain into virtually a London city state.
For decades after this the Tories have been dead meat in Scotland and Wales, even when Labour party returned there was little change. Its this as much as anything that has led to the creation of Scottish Parliament and Welsh assemblies. I don’t believe that Scottish independance will work out well for them, but the anti Westminster sentiment can probably be laid right at the policies of Thatcher and the relentless continuation of London centric policies.
Thatcher the great patriot may well be historically a major player in the break up of the UK.
You may well recall that during the year between the Falkland conflict and the election, not a day went past when the press media absolutely pushed the ‘Falklands Factor’ at us, day after day after day. Much of the electronic media reinforced this by their reporting of press reporting, you could not get away from it.
Those who pointed out that the war was unnecessary were given very short shrift.
What Thatcher did was divide the country up into two. London, and everywhere else, and thats how it is today, with further break up possible.
I watched a documentary recently that went over the Falklands conflict and I understand a number of critical vessels for the task force were actually decommissioned at the time the conflict broke out. In particular the aircraft carriers were in preparation to be scrapped. When the Argentinians invaded these were hastily re-commissioned.
Now according to this documentary the Argentinians bought forward their invasion by 6 months. If they had gone with their original time table it may have been too late for the British to re-commission the aircraft carriers which would have meant no air cover for the task force which in turn would have meant no task force.
These things don’t support Thatcher planning the war to me as it seems to have been a matter of luck that Thatcher’s cuts to the navy had not proceeded to an advanced enough stage when the invasion took place and that the task force was still possible.
The documentary was called “Falklands: How Close to Defeat?” and is well worth tracking down for anyone interested in the subject (It seems to be on youtube).
It certainly raised a tantalising alternate history possibility of the invasion going forward 6 months later and Thatcher going down in history as the leader who had gutted the UK’s defence forces to such a degree that they were no longer able to defend remaining parts of the empire.
Interesting..what I never nderstood-why didn’t the Argentines build an airstrip/airbase on the islands. With Mirage fighters based on Stanley (and not having to make the 400 mile trip from Comodoro Rivadavia), the British Task Force would be toast.
I think the Argentines were beefing up the runway at Port Stanley for exactly the purposes of basing Mirage fighters there. That plan went out of the Window though after the Vulcan bombing raid. Although the raid was said to be of limited success it did apparently panic the Argentine military into giving up the idea of basing Mirages there. Wiki has an artical on the raid itself for further info.
That documentary is certainly an interesting contrast to the British media’s slant on the conflict while it was on going. The media at the time led you to believe the result was never in doubt where as it now seems it was a far closer thing than we ever thought.
In terms of carriers, the only one that had to be reowrke would have been HMS Hermes. That ship had been in and out of mothballs a number of times, its unlikely that in the 6 months it would have been scrapped. That also happened to HMS Bulwark more than once too.
I’ve seen carriers laid up for decades, never mind months, happened to HMS Eagle and HMS Albion. The new carriers will be laid up before they are even operational.
When the Argentinian ‘scrap dealers’ landed on South Sandwich, the broadsheet press were screaming about their forced removal, pressing for UN motions and all sorts, this went on for weeks and it didn’t appear that we were going to do anything forceful about it. It is reasonable to surmise that this was the final non- act that the Argentine chose to interpret as a lack of will to defend the Falklands. We’d have something like 7 to 9 weeks to put more military assets on the Falkands at this time before the actual invasion. Now why was there no bolstering of the Falklands island defences during this period?
We had subs that could have readily got down there in good time, and with such a threat the invasion could not have happened, we’d done it before.
7 to 9 weeks? The “scrap dealers” landed on South Georgia (not one of the South Sandwich Isles, although there was an ongoing diplomatic squabble about an Argentinian station on Thule there that had gone on for years) on March 19th. The invasion of the Falklands was on April 2nd. I’m sure that 2 weeks was enough time to get a sub down there, or to reinforce the very small Marine garrison, but you are alleging a grand conspiracy, and you really shouldn’t be exaggerating stuff.
There was a visit from an Argentinian ice-breaker in December (and in retrospect that was a recce mission) . If you can show that there were units landed, I’m all ears.
Which of course is why the last Labour Govt hated it so much. The fact that every govt thinks it is biased against it just shows the BBC is just about the most balanced broadcaster on the planet IMHO.
It is not responsible for the well-known liberal bias of reality.