Alternate history: what if Argentina had won the Falklands War?
Dr Martin Farr and Nige Tassell consider how the political landscape may have changed had Britain – and the prime minister Margaret Thatcher – been defeated in the 1982 conflict
In January 1982, the Conservative Party of prime minister Margaret Thatcher was trailing in third place in the opinion polls, behind the Liberal-SDP Alliance, which stood at 40 per cent, and Labour at 30 per cent. By June of that year, the polls had been turned on their head: Labour were still second, but the Tories now had the approval of 51 per cent of the country.
The Falklands War had been fought between these polls, and the events in the South Atlantic, where Britain’s naval taskforce had evicted the invading Argentinians in a bloody conflict, transformed Thatcher’s political fortunes. As the taskforce sailed home in triumph, her future in Downing Street was assured. The following year, she recorded the biggest landslide victory in a general election since 1945.
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But what if the Argentinian military had sent the Royal Navy packing? The popular belief is, after all, that the electoral success of 1983 was all due to the war and that, without the air of triumphalism, the Conservative Party would have been on shaky ground heading towards a general election. That belief isn’t completely watertight.
“Even without a Falklands victory, the re-election of the Conservatives in either 1983 or 1984 was still more likely than not,” explains Dr Martin Farr, senior lecturer in contemporary British history at Newcastle University. “But, in the event of an Argentinian victory, Thatcher would have resigned immediately and a new leader would still probably have gone on to win, as Harold Macmillan did in 1959 after replacing Anthony Eden, who had been brought down by his own foreign crisis – Suez.”
Had Thatcher resigned, her unpopular economic policies may well have been jettisoned by the party. “It would have all depended on when a subsequent leader replaced her. Early on in her premiership, there were few sufficiently senior figures who were so like-minded, but over time, as she transformed the party, there were more. The 1983 general election gave the impregnable base – and a majority that took three elections to erode – but the subsequent election, held in 1987, ensured the effective irreversibility of the revolution.”
Had, though, the Conservatives lost the election in either 1983 or 1984, the weakness of the Labour Party and the rise of the Liberal-SDP Alliance would almost certainly have meant no one party taking sole control of government. “It was a uniquely divided electoral opposition,” says Dr Farr.
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“Labour’s Michael Foot would still have been the alternative prime minister, as the Alliance was hampered by uncertainty in voters’ minds as to whether David Steel, the Liberal leader, or Roy Jenkins, the SDP leader, would be PM. Labour could still rely on its heartlands: in 1983, 28 per cent of votes provided Labour with 209 MPs, while 25 per cent for the Alliance delivered 23. A hung parliament would have been most likely, with some sort of Labour-Alliance agreement – but one probably short of a coalition.”
Self-inflicted wound
With Thatcher not in Number 10 – and regardless of which party held the reins of power – the brutality of the 1984-85 miners’ strike almost certainly wouldn’t have been witnessed. “There had been miners’ strikes before, but never one engineered by a government for expressly political purposes. It is unlikely that another prime minister would have sought it and, therefore, that such a protracted dispute, where victory was all, would have happened. But the erosion of the sector, with the weakening of the union, would still have occurred, merely over a longer period.”
Had Thatcher fallen from power, it would have been a self-inflicted wound. “The greatest irony of the Falklands War is that what became known as a testament to British resolution and strength was occasioned by the absence of either. It was an avoidable conflict,” Dr Farr stresses.
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“The Argentinian invasion was almost invited by the actions of the British government, including the planned decommissioning of HMS Endurance, which had maintained a naval presence in the area. Indeed, had the war taken place even a year later, the chances of British success would have been much lower, following the Nott Defence Review of 1981 that had promised substantial cuts to defence spending.”
As Dr Farr observes, the timing of the war had a profound effect on subsequent foreign policy. The British victory “renewed the enthusiasm for hard power in foreign policy. Admiral Sir Henry Leach famously stiffened the prime minister’s resolve: if we ‘do not achieve complete success, in another few months we shall be living in a different country whose word counts for little’.” A failure to reclaim the Falklands would have diminished Britain’s standing on the international stage, meaning its place at the forefront of future conflicts in, say, Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn’t have necessarily been guaranteed.
The result of the war had profound consequences in South America, too. The Argentinian retention of Islas Malvinas would have strengthened the junta, allowing it to continue its repression of the population. Instead, the British victory hastened its demise, as Dr Farr concludes. “Defeat certainly brought an end to military rule quicker than would otherwise have been the case. After all, what’s the point of a military government if it loses wars?”
In context: the Falklands War
In April 1982, the Argentinian military invaded the British-held Falkland Islands, repeating the mission the following day on South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands.
The Royal Navy swiftly dispatched a heavy taskforce to the South Atlantic and, after 74 days of bloody conflict that took more than 900 lives, Argentina surrendered. The Argentinian military junta would fall in 1983, the same year that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher went on to record one of the largest electoral victories of recent times.
Britain’s sovereignty over the Falkland Islands – known as Islas Malvinas in Buenos Aires – is still contested by some people today, more than 40 years later.
Martin Farr is senior lecturer in contemporary British history at Newcastle University. His upcoming book is Margaret Thatcher’s World
This article was first published in the January 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed
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