From Suez to the Falklands - Part 5

Perhaps the first victim of Margaret Thatcher's rise to power was Punk itself, which deflated at almost the precise moment of her infamous recital of St. Francis of Assisi's Prayer outside 10 Downing Street. Rather than offering a restoration of the old order of deference, the new regime intended to liquidate what remained of the old world to an extent that the punks had not even begun to comprehend. First to go were to be the old nationalised industries, which were deemed to represent an inefficient sop to socialism, and incubators for the trades union militancy that was anathema to the new economic order. The withdrawal of support for both public and private industry coincided with a worldwide recession, itself prompted by that familiar bugbear, a sharp rise in the oil price. The result was an alarming rise in unemployment, which was to reach a hitherto unprecedented three million. It initially appeared that Thatcher, her popularity plummeting amid vistas of urban riots and dole queues, was yet another dud, as the malaise contined much as before. Indeed events got so bad that the pulse of popular culture briefly revived, most notably in the form of The Specials' "Ghost Town", the most acute musical appraisal of the early Thatcher era. If the energy from Punk was still extant, however, it was confined to a rarefied form. Having failed to kick down the front door, the clarion call for many of the remaining punks was "entryism"; an attempt to package subversive content within an "aspirational" commercial form. This had very brief success in the pop charts, although most of the alleged subversion went over the punters' heads, and its very existence was a de facto acknowledgement of defeat. Although it is retrospectively viewed as forming a seamless continuity within a singular Punk moment, the New Pop was ultimately an inadequate response to an earlier failure.

Despite its apparent struggles, the Conservative government did have one asset that had been far less available to its predecessors, and that was the burgeoning production of its own source of oil, thanks to the exploration of the North Sea over the two prior decades. As the revenues from this source began to accrue from the beginning of the 1980's, they would form a stable floor on which all other economic policy could be built, and permitted a degree of risk taking not previously permissible. Initially, a good portion of this money would be spent mitigating the appalling levels of deprivation that the Government's parlous industrial policies had generated, as entire regions suffered economic devastation. The evisceration of domestic industry was also enabled by British membership of the European Economic Community, which had been negotiated by the earlier Heath government. This effectively allowed the relocation of the locus of south-east England's industrial supply from northern Britain to Germany, a scheme that would simply not have been possible if the UK had remained outside the bloc. As such, London and the south-east would become a consumer fringe of the greater Continental economy, rather than being the nerve centre of an industrial economy of their own, with all the effort and strife that implied.

Nonetheless, it was clear that two years into her premiership, Margaret Thatcher was no less vulnerable than her predecessors had been, and just as her policies were being viewed as unnecessarily harsh and extreme, so the opposition Labour Party were emboldened to combat them with increasingly radical proposals of their own. However, it was seven thousand miles away, in the South Atlantic that the critical event of the era would unfold. This would focus on a neglected imperial possession known as the Falkland Islands, which the British Government had been quietly attempting to cede to Argentina over the objections of its inhabitants. The latest attempt to palm off the islands to the Argentinians had been a leasing scheme, which had been rejected by the military junta in Buenos Aires due to what they perceived was its excessive length of 99 years. The Argentinians had been emboldened further by the British Government's 1981 defence white paper, which had recommended swingeing cuts to the Royal Navy's surface fleet in order to redirect spending towards shoring up the "main front" against the Warsaw Pact in Europe. The Argentinian junta, under the hapless General Leopoldo Galtieri, had at least as many domestic problems as Thatcher's administration, this intensifying their inclination to resolve the issue of "Las Malvinas" once and for all. As a consequence, on 2nd April 1982, Argentian forces seized the Falklands in an amphibious operation that appeared to all the world as a fait accompli.

Once again, it appeared that a British prime minister was being presented with a humiliating ejection from an imperial possession. However, on this occasion the defence chiefs were surprisingly optimistic that the situation could be reversed, and, for once, they found themselves serving a Prime Minister who was prepared to countenace an unusually high degree of risk. A naval task force was accordingly assembled, and the islands were retaken by what would subsequently be recognised as the narrowest of margins, as the operation had faced disaster on numerous occasions. But far more notable than the military aspects of the Falklands campaign was the symbolism. This was addressed in a remarkable essay by the US naval historian Norman Friedman, who observed that:

"In 1982, many in the Soviet leadership believed that the West had lost so much of its morale that its end was inevitable, and perhaps even near. The Soviets themselves were in trouble, but they thought they could survive. The Argentinians clearly thought much the same thing about the British. Initially many in Britain seem to have assumed that Argentinian seizure of the islands was just another unavoidable step in the slow decline of the British Empire."

Although small in scale, the Falklands War was probably the most consequential and far-reaching conflict of the second half of the 20th Century, simply because it demonstrated an apparent resolve that had previously been considered lacking. As Friedman further explained:

"The Soviet leadership was shocked. The West was still a serious threat. The Soviets found themselves taking Western initiatives, such as Reagan’s “Star Wars,” very seriously indeed. Thatcher’s was not, of course, the only demonstration of Western resolve; at about the same time, the Russians found it impossible to intimidate NATO governments that had decided to accept the deployment of U.S. Pershing and Tomahawk missiles on their soil. They, in turn, were probably much encouraged by Thatcher’s example."

The Soviets' appreciation of declining Western resolve had been partially based on its popular culture, which they had assessed as being both the source and the product of its demoralisation. The famous aversion of the Soviet authorities to the music of The Beatles was believed in the West to be due to its potential to grant Soviet citizens a tantalising glimpse of Western freedom. In fact, the opposite was the case, as the Soviets believed that the music was just one more avenue for social and cultural dissolution; that it was as effective a route to demoralisation as opium. If the Soviets could take some satisfaction from what Punk demonstrated about the wretched psychological conditions in the West, they were absolutely determined that it would not be allowed to affect life behind the Iron Curtain. However, if, contrary to all cultural indications, the West was not as weak as it appeared, then the fate of the Soviet Union was sealed.

However, the Soviets had essentially been correct. The explosion of British popular culture had been totally dependent on the collapse of national morale and the consequent malaise within the ruling class. Post-war popular music was like a flourescent lichen that could only grow on rot. And in its display of incontrovertible ruling class competence, the Falklands War effectively broke the back of post-war popular culture, and it would never fully recover. Following the Falklands, the last big punk bands, The Clash and The Jam, would split up, along with numerous of their peers. Those bands that stuck around invariably softened and slicked-up their sound, in anticipation of the unsympathic commercial environment that they would soon find themselves in. The result would be the infamous musical desert of the mid-Eighties, in which commercial brashness would contrast with the feyest and most colourless "indie" music, with little of sustenance inbetween. The sense of danger, revolution and infinite possibility present in the beat boom and Punk would never fully return. For her part, Thatcher would take the antinomian energy of Punk and direct it against her internal enemies. If the Queen could be dismembered then so could the National Union of Mineworkers. If the Union Jack could be torn up, then so could the regulations that restrained the City of London. What the punks had failed to understand is that once the most sacred national symbols are defiled, then nothing is sacred and anything goes. All Margaret Thatcher ultimately did was confront the rebels and revolutionaries of pop culture with the logic of their own desires.