Britain Goes to War in the South Atlantic: The Caribbean Community’s Divided Loyalties

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 July 1982 | Period covered: January–June 1982

Key Developments at a Glance

• 2 April 1982: Argentina invades the Falkland Islands; Thatcher dispatches task force; Parliament recalled for emergency Saturday sitting; cross-party support for military response.
• 2 May 1982: Argentine cruiser General Belgrano sunk by HMS Conqueror; 323 Argentine sailors killed; controversy over whether ship was outside the exclusion zone.
• 4 May 1982: HMS Sheffield sunk by Exocet missile; 20 killed; war becomes real for British public watching television in their living rooms.
• 21 May 1982: British troops land at San Carlos Bay; fight north through Goose Green and Darwin; Stanley surrounded by mid-June.
• 14 June 1982: Argentine forces at Stanley surrender; war ends; 907 dead in total; Thatcher’s political standing transformed.
• British Nationality Act 1981, granted Royal Assent October 1981, approaches its January 1983 commencement date; community organisations intensify preparation and advocacy.

The Falklands War, which dominates the first six months of 1982 with an intensity that crowds out almost every other public concern, presents the Caribbean community in Britain with one of its most complex moments of national identification. The community is British. Its members serve in the British armed forces; community members are among those dispatched to the South Atlantic in the task force. The community’s support for the men and women who serve in its name is not conditional on agreement with every political decision that placed them there. But the Falklands War is being prosecuted by a government whose domestic programme has been consistently hostile to the community’s interests, and the patriotic framing of the conflict — a Britain fighting for sovereign territory and the rights of British subjects — sits alongside a British Nationality Act that has just received Royal Assent and is now preparing to differentiate between categories of British subject in ways that the Caribbean community does not consider to be neutral.

The Course of the War

On 2 April 1982, Argentine forces under General Leopoldo Galtieri invade the Falkland Islands, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic with a population of approximately 1,800 people. Margaret Thatcher recalls Parliament for an emergency session on the following day, a Saturday, and announces the dispatch of a naval task force to reclaim the islands. The House of Commons supports the military response with unusual cross-party unity. Labour leader Michael Foot, pacifist by instinct and background, speaks in favour of the task force.

The war’s key moments arrive in rapid succession. On 2 May, HMS Conqueror sinks the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, killing 323 Argentine sailors; the ship is later reported to have been outside the exclusion zone that Britain had declared around the islands, producing a controversy about the decision to fire that will continue for years. On 4 May, an Exocet missile sinks HMS Sheffield; twenty British sailors are killed; the television footage of the burning Sheffield makes the war viscerally real for a British public that had perhaps expected a faster resolution. British troops land at San Carlos Bay on 21 May, fight their way through Goose Green and Darwin — where Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones is killed in circumstances that earn him a posthumous Victoria Cross — and surround Stanley. The Argentine garrison surrenders on 14 June. The war lasts seventy-four days and kills 907 people: 255 British, 649 Argentine, and three Falkland Islands civilians.

The Community’s Relationship to the War

The Caribbean community’s response to the Falklands War cannot be reduced to a single position. Community members serve in the British forces in the South Atlantic; the community takes pride in their courage and mourns those who are killed. The community’s sense of itself as British — hard-won against decades of British resistance to that identification — means that a war fought under the British flag is not simply someone else’s conflict. At the same time, the war is being fought in the South Atlantic, a region geographically continuous with the Caribbean, and the community’s sense of the region’s history — of colonialism, of disputed sovereignty, of the rights of small territories against larger powers — is not straightforwardly accommodated by the Thatcher government’s framing of the conflict as a simple matter of national sovereignty and the rule of law.

The community also notes that the Thatcher government’s claim to be acting in defence of the rights of British subjects takes on a specific quality when read alongside the British Nationality Act 1981. The Act, which received Royal Assent in October 1981, differentiates between classes of British subject and is understood by the Caribbean community as a legislative attempt to exclude it from the fullest expression of British citizenship. A government that claims to go to war for the rights of British subjects in the Falklands is also a government that has legislated to reduce the citizenship rights of British subjects who happen to have been born in the Caribbean. The community holds both of these facts at the same time.

Jamaica and the Diaspora

Edward Seaga’s JLP government, in its second year, has aligned Jamaica closely with the Reagan administration and has implemented the IMF structural adjustment programme that is imposing significant social costs on the island. The diaspora in Britain follows events in Jamaica with the attention of people who are simultaneously navigating the political consequences of the Falklands War and the practical implications of a Nationality Act that will transform their legal position. The community’s dual consciousness — of Britain as home and of Jamaica as origin, obligation, and return — is sharpened by a period in which both countries are going through major political changes simultaneously.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; New Nation; The Voice; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Commission for Racial Equality; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); Ministry of Defence; House of Commons Hansard.

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