The Falklands Conflict, Forty Years Later

[Slim]

8th March, 1982

Sovereignty discussions between Britain and Argentina have taken place irregularly since 1964, when the United Nations passed a resolution calling on the two nations to negotiate a peaceful solution over the disputed islands.

Deputy Foreign Minister Richard Luce met with his Argentine counterpart Ernesto Ros in New York last month. But last week the Argentine Foreign Minister Costa Mendez announced that Argentine reserves the right to "employ other means" if Britain refuses to cede sovereignty.

Two days ago, a Hercules aircraft operated by the Argentine military airline LADE landed at Port Stanley, ostensibly due to a fuel leak. But several senior Argentine military officers were aboard, and the local LADE commandant provided them with a tour of Stanley and the immediate vicinity.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher instructs the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence to prepare contingency plans in case of an Argentine blockade or invasion of the islands.

[dom]

You have to wonder whether Thatcher put the Argentinians up to this.  Certainly saved her bacon domestically.  If no prompting was carried out it was serendipitous; I bet she thanked them to herself

[Slim]

I hadn't heard that one before - in all honesty I don't think even Neil Oliver would buy that one.

I remember reading an analysis in the '80s that suggested she would have won the '83 election either way. I wouldn't quite say the 'Falklands Factor' was a myth, but I do think it's overstated.

[pxr5]

I've been there twice (the Missus once)  - and it's a sh*thole.

[dom]

I hadn't heard that one before - in all honesty I don't think even Neil Oliver would buy that one.

I remember reading an analysis in the '80s that suggested she would have won the '83 election either way. I wouldn't quite say the 'Falklands Factor' was a myth, but I do think it's overstated.

It was slightly tongue in cheek until I read this...

It states that the Conservative Government were looking to hand South Atlantic Islands over to Argentina. When this plan stalled in Parliament Argentina thought if they attacked the UK would hand them over as they were looking to anyway!

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-falklands-gamble#_=_

The decision to attack in this light could be seen as a political gambit, realising how poorly she was perceived at the time and knowing that the general population reacts well to the stirring up a bit of national sovereignty and pride.  Islands that were otherwise a burden, suddenly became more attractive

[Slim]

I can accept your second paragraph there but definitely not the speculation in the last paragraph. Obviously the decision to attack the islands was not taken by Mrs Thatcher.

[dom]

I can accept your second paragraph there but definitely not the speculation in the last paragraph. Obviously the decision to attack the islands was not taken by Mrs Thatcher.

Apologies, the decision to send a task force to defend the Falklands

[Nick]

I've been there twice (the Missus once)  - and it's a sh*thole.

Business or pleasure?

[dom]

Agreed about Foot - a bit like with Corbyn the Labour party really shot themselves in the shoe encased organ

[pxr5]

I've been there twice (the Missus once)  - and it's a sh*thole.

Business or pleasure?

Haha, certainly not pleasure. If the earth has an arsehole, the Falkland Islands is it. I don't think many people would ever choose to holiday there.

[David L]

I have it on very good authority that defeat in The Falklands was not too far away from being the outcome

[Slim]

I liked Michael Foot, but his worldview had already had its day by the time he became leader. Healey might have been a more moderate and stronger leader potentially, but the political philosophy that both men espoused was already in the dustbin of history, where it belonged.

Long before 1983 Healey had crawled to the EMF, cap in hand, to beg for money to prop up the British state because that awful, final British socialist government in which he served as Chancellor had run out of other people's money to spend. Their terms for bailing us out were to impose public spending cuts that made the austerity budgets of the 2010s look positively extravagant - and all that culminated of course with the infamous Winter of Discontent at the end of the previous decade.

No, the British People had had enough of that model of ruining British industries by privatising them, removing competition by making them monopolies then crippling them with the militant trade unionism that had Labour in its pocket. Margaret Thatcher saved us from all that starting in 1979 and if she hadn't, we'd have been a third-world country by the '90s. We near enough were by 1979.

It wasn't the Falklands War that won the 1983 General Election for the Conservatives. It was Michael Foot's "longest suicide note in history"; a manifesto that called for wholesale renationalisation, abandonment of our nuclear deterrent, and for Britain to leave the EEC at a time when it was a relatively benign trading partnership. The country had already woken up.

To our credit we never looked back, and when Labour next had a spell in office it was a considerably less harmful government that even had a modest privatisation of its own and wisely chose to build on the precious Thatcher legacy.

By the way I'm not sure you'll find anyone of note in the Parliamentary Labour Party complaining about those defence cuts before they were implemented. Keir Starmer didn't invent hindsight.

[Slim]

9th March, 1982

Argentine scrap metal merchant Constantino Davidoff notifies the British Embassy in Buenos Aires that a group of his workmen will leave for South Georgia in two days' time on a vessel chartered from the Argentine navy, the Bahia Buen Suceso. Davidoff has signed a contract with Christian Salvesen, a whaling firm, to dismantle their property at Leith.

Davidoff is required first to report to British authorities on arrival.

South Georgia is a remote and inhospitable British Overseas Territory about eight-hundred miles east-south-east of the Falklands and is also claimed by Argentina.

[Nick]

Weren't the Falklands mostly important to us as they justified our "cake slice" of the Antarctic?

[Slim]

19th March, 1982

Davidoff's scrap metal workers arrive at Leith whaling station on South Georgia. They fail to ask permission to land from the British Antarctic Survey base at Grytviken.

After hearing gunshots, a party of four scientists from the base finds a party of fifty mixed civilian and Argentine military personnel barbecuing one of the island's endangered population of reindeer. The scrap metal workers have been joined on their journey by Argentine marines posing as civilian scientists.

Lieutenant Commander Alfredo Astiz, in charge of the Argentine Buzo Tactico marines present, parades his men in uniform and raises the Argentine flag.

The BAS personnel report the incident to London.