The Falklands Play, a BBC production dramatizing the invasion of the Falklands and the preparations for the British response. When this popped up on Amazon Prime Video, I thought, “Uh, oh. This is going to be a leftist hit-piece on Thatcher.” It turns out to be quite the opposite. This made-for-TV movie was originally commissioned in 1987 but didn’t air until 2002. According to a reviewer, “Back in the 1980s, the BBC deemed the script to be too pro-Thatcher and jingoistic in its tone.” It certainly casts Mrs. Thatcher in a positive light, though I’d hardly call it jingoistic. The Labour Party, led by Michael Foot, doesn’t come off looking too good. This makes sense given Foot’s connections to the KGB.
The performances are good. The production values are cinema-quality. The script relies heavily on primary sources such as debates in Parliament and Cabinet meeting notes. It may not be entirely historically accurate but it captures the moment. Even though Mrs. Thatcher was the Iron Lady, she was surprisingly hesitant to defend British subjects. In the end, she finds her resolve. In response to her Foreign Secretary’s reluctance to invade, she pulls no punches:
Only one thing makes war justified and lawful — only one thing: when it’s a struggle for law against force for people’s laws, their language, and way of life. Everything that makes them what they are against a brutal effort to impose on them a life, a language, and laws which are not theirs and they do not want when everything has been tried and failed.
If we are wrong to fight now, we were wrong to fight Hitler; we were wrong to fight the Kaiser; we were wrong to fight Napoleon; wrong to fight Philip of Spain; wrong to do anything but throw in the towel and crumple before the first brute force to come along and abandon all the good and fine and splendid things that Britain has given the world through the centuries for a bleak, totalitarian desert.
This speech is included in the last half of the trailer at IMDb (linked above).
The first couple of sentences about a “people’s laws, their language, and way of life” struck me as newly relevant as Europe, and to a lesser extent America, is being invaded by foreigners who have no respect for the laws, language, and way of life of the locals. As these invaders seek create enclaves with their own laws, language, and way of life, will the West resist or crumple, thereby abandoning all the good and fine and splendid things it has given the world?