After the Falklands: Thatcher Triumphant, the Community Counting the Cost

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 1983 | Period covered: July–December 1982

Key Developments at a Glance

• 14 June 1982: Falklands War ends with Argentine surrender; Thatcher’s political standing transformed; a general election before 1984 becomes increasingly likely and increasingly dangerous for Labour.
• Sabra and Shatila, September 16–18: Lebanese Christian militias massacre up to 3,500 Palestinian civilians in Beirut refugee camps under Israeli military watch; international horror.
• British Nationality Act 1981 comes into force 1 January 1983; community organisations spend second half of 1982 preparing for the Act’s practical implications for Caribbean families.
• Caribbean community members who served or had family serve in the Falklands task force navigate a complex patriotism: loyalty to Britain and unease with post-war political consequences.
• Edward Seaga PM Jamaica; Michael Manley in opposition; Jamaican economy under IMF adjustment; diaspora remittances critical to island household economies.
• Race Relations Act 1976 enforcement continues; Commission for Racial Equality documents employment and housing discrimination in the Falklands victory’s patriotic afterglow.

The second half of 1982 is lived in the shadow of a war that has ended and in the growing shadow of a Nationality Act that has not yet begun. The Falklands conflict, which lasted seventy-four days from the Argentine invasion of 2 April to the surrender at Port Stanley on 14 June, has produced 255 British military dead, 649 Argentine military dead, and three Falkland Islands civilians dead. It has also produced a political transformation in Britain that the Caribbean community must now factor into every calculation about its own situation. Thatcher, whose government was trailing Labour in the polls before the invasion, is now riding the highest approval ratings of her time in office. An election that might have removed a government hostile to the community’s interests will now, when it comes, almost certainly confirm that government in power.

The Falklands Aftermath and the Community

The Caribbean community’s relationship to the Falklands War and its aftermath is not simple. Community members are among the British citizens who served in the South Atlantic; the Royal Navy and the Army both have significant numbers of Caribbean-heritage personnel. The community’s pride in its members’ service is genuine. But the patriotic afterglow of the Falklands is a nationalism that the community has a more complex relationship to than the version projected by Thatcher’s speeches: this is a nationalism that has historically included the community in its labour requirements while excluding it from its sense of identity, and the Falklands victory does not change that.

The practical consequences of the Falklands victory for the community are political rather than military. Thatcher, newly empowered, will face no serious domestic challenge to the programme she is pursuing. The economic policies that have produced the community’s current hardships — high unemployment, cuts to public services, the industrial strategy that has devastated the manufacturing sector where many community members work — will continue without the electoral pressure that a close contest might have created. The community enters 1983 knowing that the political landscape has been redrawn against it.

Sabra and Shatila

On the nights of 16–18 September 1982, Lebanese Christian militias enter the Sabra neighbourhood and the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, areas then under the control of Israeli forces, and kill up to 3,500 Palestinian civilians. The massacre occurs while the Israeli army, under Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, controls the surrounding area and illuminates it with flares overnight. The Israeli government subsequently establishes the Kahan Commission, which finds Sharon bears personal responsibility for failing to prevent the killings. The international response is one of horror; in Israel itself, 400,000 people demonstrate against the massacre in Tel Aviv. The Caribbean community follows the events in Lebanon through the same moral framework it brings to all civilian deaths in political conflict: the killing of civilians is wrong, regardless of the political cause in whose name it is done.

Preparing for the Nationality Act

The British Nationality Act 1981, which will come into force on 1 January 1983, has been the subject of sustained community advocacy and legal preparation throughout the second half of 1982. Community organisations, legal advice centres, and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants have been working to inform Caribbean families about the Act’s practical implications — which are complex, technical, and, in many cases, harmful. The Act’s effects on the right of abode, on the citizenship status of children born abroad to British parents, and on the documentation requirements that will govern entry and family reunion cases are the subject of community education campaigns that must reach people who have not been following the legislation’s passage through Parliament and who will encounter its effects for the first time when they attempt to bring a relative to join them or when their child’s British citizenship status is questioned at a port of entry.

Jamaica and the Diaspora

Edward Seaga’s JLP government, now in its second year, continues the economic programme of structural adjustment that is reshaping Jamaica’s public finances in ways that produce hardship for ordinary Jamaicans. Michael Manley and the PNP are in opposition and are developing an economic alternative that draws partly on the experience of the first Manley government’s difficulties and partly on a revised engagement with the market-oriented economics that the international financial institutions are promoting across the developing world. The diaspora in Britain sends remittances that sustain island families through the adjustment period and maintains the cultural and political connections to Jamaica that make the diaspora something more than a collection of individuals who happen to have Caribbean passports.

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); Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; House of Commons Hansard.

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