Still fighting for the Falklands

THIRTY-SEVEN years ago this month, Phil Wilson, then a 22-year-old civil servant in Durham, watched with fascinated horror and a growing sense of pride as the Falklands War unfolded on the nightly news 8,000 miles away in the south Atlantic.

The headlines introduced names of distant locations – San Carlos, Bluff Cove, Port Stanley, Goose Green, Mount Tumbledown – that suddenly became battlefields which are now seared into the British memory. Then there were the losses, usually amid pictures of helicopters battling through smoke to rescue survivors from burning ships, of HMS Sheffield, MC Atlantic Conveyor, HMS Coventry, RFA Sir Galahad, RFA Sir Tristram, HMS Glamorgan and, of course, the Belgrano and the Santa Fe. These, too, are names synonymous with the war.

But 37 years on, Phil Wilson, now the MP for Sedgefield and a member of the Defence Select Committee, has just returned from a visit to the islands as part of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme.

“It’s the only scheme in the world where parliamentarians put on uniforms and see how the military services operate,” he says.

Port Stanley Airport was reached by a six hour flight to Cape Verde Islands, off the north-west coast of Africa, and then a 10½ hour flight to the Falklands. Nearly 800 islands make up the archipelago, which is 300 miles from the Argentinian coast, but despite the long journey, the islands feel quite close to home.

“There’re no real tarmacked roads except in Mount Pleasant and Port Stanley – it’s just gravel roads, but as you drive along, you feel you are going across the Yorkshire moors,” he says. “They get more sun than we do, but it’s very windy. The only trees have been put in as windbreaks by the military.

“And they don’t just have seagulls on the beaches, they have penguins.

“But it feels very isolated. Port Stanley, for all I remember hearing about it from those news reports, is just three rows of houses.”

The population of the Falklands is about 3,000, from 60 nationalities, although most have British roots. They govern their own affairs through an elected assembly with eight members.

“It’s like a parish council, but it doesn’t just run the flowerbeds and playgrounds – they’re running a small country: the education service, health service, and things like mineral rights, because they have found oil off the coast, and fishing rights,” he says. “Forty per cent of their GDP is fish, which is essentially squid, and the Chinese and Taiwanese send 500 boats over and give the Falkland Islands £1m royalties each a year.”

The topic of the war is never far from the surface. When he visited, a shop window in Stanley had a homemade poster in it saying: “Peace will only come when the Argentinians stop.”

“There’s still a lot of rawness about the war from those who lived through it,” Mr Wilson says. “I spoke to one young member of the assembly whose family is from Goose Green, population 100, and they were all locked up in the village hall during the conflict, and another guy was from Pebble Island where there was an SAS raid to destroy some Argentinian aircraft, and he was held captive, so you can understand the strength of the memories.”

There are, of course, two sides in a war. The British lost 255 members of the armed forces, and three Falkland islanders died, whereas the Argentinians lost 649. Although diplomatic relations were restored between the two sides in 1989, in 1994 Argentina added its claim to the Islas Malvinas to its constitution, so tensions remain.

“We were on Mount Harriet, scene of some of the fiercest fighting before the liberation of Stanley, and some Argentinian vets came over and shook the hand of our military guide,” he says. “That was very moving. There is a strong belief in reconciliation, and we are trying to help that along.

“We went to an Argentinian cemetery where there are a lot of unknown soldiers’ graves, but they’re joint initiatives between Britain and Argentina to identify them through their DNA, and I was pleased to learn that we had sent some experts over to help find the sub Santa Fe, which was sunk during the war. Those are excellent ways of breaking down barriers.”

Mr Wilson was specifically there to visit British troops. There are four Typhoon fighter planes – “a flight” – stationed down there and a company (usually about 100) of soldiers, plus a patrol boat, HMS Clyde.

“I’m always struck by the sheer professionalism of our troops,” says the MP. “Going round, hearing the stories and seeing the cemeteries really taught me about the blood and the bravery that we put into it.

“It also reminded me that it is for the military to fight wars and politicians to try to prevent them happening in the first place, although that isn’t always possible.”

But that doesn’t mean that British politicians should be looking to turn the islands over to the Argentinians.

“We still have a responsibility to the islanders,” he says. “The islands are our only base in the south Atlantic so we need them for strategic reasons, and they are important for training our forces. Our presence down there also gives a signal to other countries saying don’t try, that we will defend what’s ours – but there is a big need for reconciliation.”

Even though he was 3,000 miles from the North-East, it wasn’t just the landscape that reminded Mr Wilson of home. In 1982, when the islands were invaded, the governor was Sir Rex Hunt, who was born in Redcar and who returned to Elton, near Stockton, when his diplomatic career is over.

“Now the chief executive of the islands is Barry Rowland,” says Mr Wilson. “He was born in Rowlands Gill, went to Durham university, was the chief exec of Newcastle council, and when he realised that I was the MP for Sedgefield he said: ‘my uncle lived in the Trimdons’.”

There may be big problems but it is still a small world.