Unreal Talk – Let’s Give Back the Falklands!

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We’re such assholes. Honestly, where do we get off? Where do us Britons find the arrogance to tell everyone that various islands just west of Nowhere are contiguous with the British landmass? As if it weren’t bad enough that the UK includes a third of another country quite clearly situated the other side of the Irish Sea, we’ve also managed to harvest up whole handfuls of foreign islands, from Fiji to Tierra Del Fuego, planted a flag on their rocks, and taught their subjects how to read about the weddings of our minor royals in OK! Magazine.  

Well the time has come, for the sake of our own national psychology rather than anyone else’s, to give up our vain delusions of global ownership. It’s time to give back the Falklands. The only way Britain can ever grow up is if we throw off the comfort blanket of a long-vanished past.  

To unpick the eccentricities that have led us here won’t be easy, because we are an extraordinarily sentimental people, driven by half-heard, misheard echoes of our martial past. And we hate – hate – hate to admit that we were ever wrong. “Oh, well,” we all go: “Yeah, sure, maybe we could have given it back in 1979, but now – British blood has been spilt there. So we couldn’t possibly. It’d be offending the memory of those brave men who gave their lives so that the Union Jack could be hoisted in South America.”

Surely, though, the chief characteristic of British blood is that it dies for a lie. Dying for precisely no reason whatsoever has been a British serviceman’s supreme patriotic duty from Khartoum to Magersfontein, to The Somme to Borneo. All British military adventures end with a big pile of corpses and someone in HQ going: “Well old boy, maybe we should negotiate instead.”

And maybe that’s what should be doing now, negotiating with President Kirchner, because – and make no mistake about this – we will lose next time. And it won’t be pretty.

We simply can’t afford to keep up such a vastly expensive pantomime. Important military-strategic people spend all their time these days telling us that a slashed war budget means we won’t be able to defend the Falklands. The fact that they seem to be missing is that if we gave up defending the Falklands, we wouldn’t have the cost of defending the Falklands to contend with.

Instead of 10,000 sheep farmers 10,000 miles away, we could defend something worth defending, like, oh, say… mainland Britain? How about we benchmark what we want to defend by starting with the most obviously necessary bit, Britain, then working our way outwards? Honestly: wonderful things happen to your defence budget when you give up most of your claims on far-flung rocks a drunken ancestor once stabbed with a Union Flag.

Of course, what people will invariably say is that this argument is all about the Falklanders’ right to be British. Well, it’s obvious to even the casual observer that much of Kashmir would like to be British, but we’ve built a complex multi-tiered immigration system just to avoid that happening. If the Falklanders wish to be British, that can, of course, be arranged. The best way, however, would be if they actually came to Britain, and lived here, and stopped patriotically forcing us to defend their rock. It’s about time they stopped asking what their country can do for them, and entertained the question of what they can do for their country.

No doubt their South American home has its charms, but let’s just see what would happen if we gave them each the choice between a million quid to re-settle and sticking it out at Port Stanley. Every man has his price, and once we’ve accounted for the cost of sending aircraft carriers, fighter jets and Prince William out to those godforsakens, it would almost certainly be cheaper to give everyone on the isle a cool mill than to continue rattling our sabres at them, gratifying those belligerent assholes in South America with a semi-legit grievance to waft in our face.

Perhaps the best reason to give the Falklands back to Argentina would be to let them stew in what they’ve been missing. Your average ultra-patriot, Argie neo-skinhead seems to think that the Falklands are some sort of promised land where Kit Kats grow on trees and everyone sings hi-NRG Pop-Pop Latino on the street corners. Well in point of fact, Argies, these are some of the most barren, forbidding, clammy and dispiriting rocks on God’s good Earth. Good luck sending hundreds of your tango-loving, topless-tanning citizens as proto-settlers to an area where the maximum summertime temperature peaks at around 12.5c.

Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes

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