Again, irrelevant. You made a silly comment about her following advice, either ignorant or disregarding of the other advice that she went against. Your diversionary tactic doesn't work with me.

Did someone here say the invasion was justified? I must have missed that.

I referred to advice relevant to the sinking of the Belgrano. Is is your position that she was advised not to give the executive order that she did?

I have made no comments about her ignoring advice prior to the invasion. If you wish to allege diversionary tactics, you need to direct them at yourself.

What political gain did she obtain from permitting the sinking of the Belgrano on that particular day? I ask this as it appears that you believe it could have been shot at at will previously.

So if it wasn't justified, what difference did it make that she withdrew the one ship in the region?

No. My position is that you place great emphasis on how she acted upon advice yet seem oblivious to the fact that she went completely against an earlier piece of advice.


At will? No. Merely that its position had been known for a couple of days, due to it being tracked, and that it's position in sailing away - however temporary and being able to turn back if necessary - was less of a threat than heading towards and closer, perhaps even in the exclusion zone.

Remember the "it was a danger to our shipping" was justification. Is it really feasible that it became more dangerous when moving away?

Just doesn't seem right does it?

Hence the speculation that it was fired upon to sabotage the peaceful solution that had been worked out.

The Falklands war is almost 30 years ago. Had the Argentinians not invaded then there wouldnt have been a war.
So easy to look back and say What If this or what if that.
She made a decision right in some eyes wrong in others you cant turn back the clock.
Its since transpired that Iraq did not have WMDs but it was invaded.
Leaders make decisions that can have a great impact.
Should troops have been sent to Northern Ireland in 1969 as that wasnt a war?

That rhetoric inadvertently typifies the attitudes engendered by Thatcherism. If by "us" you mean people who were brought up or became adult in the UK during the 1980's then very few.

If you mean by "us", people of a similar generation from e.g. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Scandanavia and most other places, or Brits who were thinking adults before 1979, then the answer would be quite different.

31 years ago, April 30th the task force arrived in the total exclusion zone.

I am not going to disagree with this at all. However, I do know that my mum likes a bargain and has voted liberal all her life

Quoting one paragraph of the article can be somewhat misleading..........

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2...her-hugo-young

"I think by far her greatest virtue, in retrospect, is how little she cared if people liked her. She wanted to win, but did not put much faith in the quick smile. She needed followers, as long as they went in her frequently unpopular directions. This is a political style, an aesthetic even, that has disappeared from view. The machinery of modern political management – polls, consulting, focus groups – is deployed mainly to discover what will make a party and politician better liked, or worse, disliked. Though the Thatcher years could also be called the Saatchi years, reaching a new level of presentational sophistication in the annals of British politics, they weren't about getting the leader liked. Respected, viewed with awe, a conviction politician, but if liking came into it, that was an accident.

This is a style whose absence is much missed. It accounted for a large part of the mark Thatcher left on Britain. Her unforgettable presence, but also her policy achievements. Mobilising society, by rule of law, against the trade union bosses was undoubtedly an achievement. For the most part, it has not been undone. Selling public housing to the tenants who occupied it was another, on top of the denationalisation of industries and utilities once thought to be ineluctably and for ever in the hands of the state. Neither shift of ownership and power would have happened without a leader prepared to take risks with her life. Each now seems banal. In the prime Thatcher years they required a severity of will to carry through that would now, if called on, be wrapped in so many cycles of deluding spin as to persuade us it hadn't really happened.

These developments set a benchmark. They married the personality and belief to action. Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across a wide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. This is what we mean by the Thatcher revolution, imposing on Britain, for better or for worse, some of the liberalisation that the major continental economies know, 20 years later, they still need. I think on balance, it was for the better, and so, plainly did Thatcher's chief successor, Tony Blair. If a leader's record is to be measured by the willingness of the other side to decide it cannot turn back the clock, then Thatcher bulks big in history."

Interesting that he makes no mention of the Falklands at all in the article.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinio...cle3735339.ece

"The politics of the Thatcher years were divisive but they couldn’t be anything else. The Left wanted policies that were simply impractical and unacceptable. They could not be conceded, no matter how angry it made the unions that their demands were denied.

I was a member of the centrist Social Democratic Party during the miners’ strike and argued then, as I do now, that the Government might have done more to help those in pit villages find alternative work. But this was not what the fight was about, nor what the miners asked for. They argued that there was no such thing as an uneconomic pit and that we should use deep-mined British coal, however difficult or expensive to extract.

Such a demand was impossible to yield to. Margaret Thatcher was not being divisive by refusing to yield to it. Yesterday Dave Hopper, general secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association, said that the former Prime Minister’s death on his birthday made it “one of the best birthdays I have ever had”.

What sort of human being says something like that? The sort she was right to resist and we should be pleased was defeated. And the sort who takes all the blame for the brave miners he took down with him."

I noticed Neil Kinnock on Newsnight the other night laid the blame for the
catastrophic defeat of the miners fully on Arther Scargill. Kinnock recognised that Mrs T. was pragmatic enough to have accepted a compromise during the strike but for Scargill it was to be total victory or nothing.

Not misleading at all. Of course I read the full obituary and a very well written one it was with the balance and insight you expected from Hugo Young.

The paragraph I quoted seemed to be the kernel of his insight.

Perhaps I should have included the same link that you did. Thanks.

I'd consider that paragraph probably the weakest of the article. Interesting that he used the word "soccer" instead of "football" indicating clearly that he was a poorly informed outsider on that subject.

Oh FFS.

I am not going to second guess the decisions that were made based upon the facts known at the time by those best placed to make those decisions.

It may be that you believe that the commander of the sub was a blood thirsty, gung-ho, trigger happy fool. Put simply, I don't, neither did the commander of the Belgrano, neither did the Argentine Navy.

No peaceful solution had been worked out. I was not there so, again, I have no direct knowledge but from what I have read, the solution was a Peruvian one and was received by Mrs. Thatcher some time after the order was given.

I don't know how accurante Wiki is, but here is a link: General Belgrano

The reality was that the UK response overall was pretty moderate and restrained in the circumstances. Argentina sent reconnaissance planes to the naval force as it travelled to the Falklands. According to international law it would have been justifiable to shoot them down but instead to avoid escalation of the situation they were merely incercepted and turned away. The air bases that the Argentine planes with the exocet missiles operated from could have been bombed or special forces sent in to neutralise the threat but a more defensive posture was adopted. The likes of Michael Foot supported the use of military force to liberate the Falklands. However, the facts won't ever pursuade those who choose to believe an alternative narrative. That said some of the jingoism displayed at the time was rather unappealing.

I think the special forces were used or at least tried, I think from memory one helicopter with an SAS team was forced to land in Chile, the helicopter burnt (deliberately) the pilot arrested and the SAS slunk of into the jungle

I'm not sure that there would be much jungle on the southermost tip of south america? I remember there was a helicopter crash when the special forces went into South Georgia. The other aspect with Chile is that Argentina had adopted an aggresive posture with Chile also claiming territory and threatening them with invasion.