THE 1982 Malvinas (Falklands War) was a decisive event not just for Britain’s Foreign Policy but for its home policy.
The islands off the Argentinian coast are obviously Argentinian territory, and had been claimed as such ever since the foundation of the Argentinian state.
On the Malvinas islands live a handful of settlers, enough to populate a couple of London streets, and their flocks of sheep. Thatcher, as soon as she was elected in 1979, discarded many more British settlers, in a much richer land, when together with Lord Carrington she handed over, what is now Zimbabwe, to Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo at the Lancaster House talks – so she was not wedded to imperial possessions.
So why did the Iron Lady fight over a handful of rocks and settlers?
The answer to that question cannot be found anywhere in the Argentine or in the Malvinas.
The reason was that the Thatcher government was on the point of being brought down in Britain.
Thatcher came to office in 1979, already known as the ‘milk snatcher’, for the way that as a minister in the Heath government she had taken the school milk away from children. This was before the Heath government was brought down by the miners in 1974. The working class went on to force the repeal of every one of the Tory anti-union laws along with their industrial courts that were able to rule strikes illegal.
In 1978 she came to power as an angry right wing Tory, determined to teach the working class a lesson and greatly weaken the trade unions.
By 1982 she was hated because of the three million unemployed that her policies produced, with Labour preparing to return to office at the next election.
She needed a saviour. Then came the invasion of the Malvinas, and with it floods of media patriotism in Britain, when Thatcher and the armed forces announced that they would retake the islands, and liberate the settlers from foreign rule.
The WRP warned workers who fell for the patriotic rubbish that a successful military adventure in the Malvinas would see an army and state-backed Thatcher regime return back to Britain to assault the trade unions, starting with the nemesis of the Tories, the National Union of Mineworkers.
We declared ourselves to be opponents of the imperialist war, for the victory of the Argentinians and for a socialist revolution at home.
However there was one barrier that Thatcher had to overcome to ensure victory.
They could not assault the Malvinas without a supply of US missiles and ammunition, but the coterie of advisers around President Reagan favoured Argentina as a much more important ally of the uS in South America.
Thatcher made Reagan choose, and backed by the US, the expeditionary force triumphed after a desperate struggle with the Argentinian conscript army.
The future was revealed to British workers straight away. One of the banners of the returning victorious fleet was one hailing Thatcher and warning railmen, who were considering taking strike action, ‘You start a rail strike and we’ll organise an air strike’.
In fact the wave of nationalist hysteria swept Thatcher to a general election victory in June 1983 with a 140 plus majority, and then into a desperate one year war against the miners where the whole state apparatus was mobilised to take the field against the working class, to clear the way for the closure of the mining industry.
Thatcher then backed Murdoch in the battle to smash the Fleet Street trade unions. The feet of clay of the alleged ‘Iron Lady’ was seen when she went one step too far with her attempt to introduce a Poll Tax, which roused millions of workers to bring her down in 1990.
The lessons for today of the Malvinas war are clear, when we are faced with attempts to whip up a war hysteria against Iran. These are that chauvinism is a poison that paralyzes and destroys the workers’ movement, and that the enemy is at home.
In fact the British, American and Iranian workers must join together to smash British and US capitalism and imperialism to go forward to world socialism.