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Is Britain still fighting the Falklands War? 21%
By Alwyn Turner22%
7/14/2026, 11:01:30 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 38 faulty reasoning types, including Ambiguity (Equivocation), Biased Writer Voice, and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 24.1% saturation with 445 hits. Analysis detected 3,419 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,850 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35.1% and a BS Rank of 21% (12,678 of 15,985 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 79.30% of the article peer group.
“Same old Argies — always cheating.”
The traditional chant of English football fans captures something of the relationship between Britain and Argentina.
There’s irritation but also a tone of shoulder-shrugging resignation, an acceptance of the shenanigans you expect from an incorrigible family member.
Not a close family member, mind, more like a slightly flashy ex-brother-in-law who’s good company until he gets a bit too drunk and who never quite buys his round.
But family, nonetheless.
Although Argentina wasn’t part of the British Empire, there have long been strong ties between the countries.
British investment in the second half of the 19th century largely drove the Argentine economy as it became a major global player, with most of the infrastructure — banking, railways, shipping — British-owned, and a third of its exports going to the UK.
Culturally, it was seen as a rugged but reliable place, more akin to South Africa or Australia than to the weird, primitive mysteries of the Amazon.
If you came across a minor character in a novel by P.
G.
Wodehouse or John Buchan whose income came from Argentine shares, he was intended as a steady kind of chap, rather than a wild speculator.
If it was not actually Empire, estate agents would certainly have described it as Empire-adjacent.
It took to football and rugby, even cricket — up to a point — and was on the side of the Allies in the Second World War, albeit for just five months after belatedly entering the conflict in March 1945.
By then, though, the close economic links were dissolving, damaged by Britain’s policy in the Thirties of imposing tariffs on goods coming into the Empire, and by the nationalizing of public services under Juan Perón in the Forties.
But there was still a vague sense of kinship, as seen in the friendly football relations that were established.
Argentina played England at Wembley in 1951, and in Buenos Aires two years later, the latter attracting a then-record crowd for the country of 91,000 spectators.
“If Argentina was not actually Empire, estate agents would certainly have described it as Empire-adjacent.”
The friendliness didn’t last.
The two countries met again in 1966 in a World Cup quarter-final match that was dubbed “the Battle of Wembley” in England, and “the theft of the century” in Argentina.
The issue, as England saw it, was the physical aggression of the South Americans.
This, said the England manager Alf Ramsey, explained a lackluster performance: “Our best football will come against the team who come out to play football and not act as animals.”
Argentina, meanwhile, was raging against what it saw as a biased referee, who sent off its captain and permitted the only goal of the game — scored by Geoff Hurst — to stand, despite a suspicion of offside.
Most of the world seemed to support the Argentine position.
There was talk of a South American split from FIFA, and newspapers from Italy and Czechoslovakia to Mexico and Brazil denounced “favoritism for the English team”.
In Buenos Aires, the mass-circulation paper Crónica had a cartoon of the tournament mascot, World Cup Willie, dressed as a pirate, and complained that “just as the English pirates stole the Malvinas, they made a deal with the referee to sell us out”.
And there was the rub, the great stumbling block in Anglo-Argentine relations.
Las Malvinas — the Falkland Islands, as Britain called them — lay some 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, and there was a long-running dispute over their ownership.
They had never been inhabited by Argentinians, Britain had been in unbroken possession since 1833 and, even as the Empire was being dismantled, the couple of thousand inhabitants unanimously wished to remain British.
Argentina, however, had inherited a claim on the territory when gaining independence from Spain and had never given up its demand that it be handed over.
This meant something in Buenos Aires, though most Britons were unaware of the islands’ existence, let alone that there was any controversy.
Insofar as they were known, it was probably through Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World (1932).
At the end of the book, when the dissident Bernard Marx is being sent into exile, so that he might write poetry without disturbing the stability of society, he asks for the most remote, forlorn and uncomfortable conditions, the better to inspire his work, and is promptly despatched to the Falklands.
Thereafter, we assume, he will never be heard of again.
When the central American state of Belize became independent in 1981, the Daily Mirror provided its readers with a list of what was left of the British Empire: Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Pitcairn, St Helena and the Turks & Caicos Islands.
It forgot even to mention the Falklands.
Suggested reading What the Left can learn from Argentina
By Thomas Peermohamed Lambert
There was, therefore, genuine surprise when Britain woke up on an April morning in 1982 to hear the news that Argentine troops had invaded the islands and seized control.
There was even more surprise when the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, announced that a military force would be sent to evict the occupiers, should diplomatic means fail.
Such resolute determination was not what the British people had come to expect of its post-imperial governments, but Thatcher saw it as a question of principle.
“The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race,” she told the Commons.
“They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their allegiance.”
Moreover, Argentina was then a military dictatorship, following a coup the previous year, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri.
As Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party, put it, when some of his MPs expressed reservations about the military operation: “I know a fascist when I see one.”
Ten weeks later, the Argentine forces on the island surrendered, following a successful counter-invasion.
Some 900 were killed on both sides in the conflict, with a further 2,400 wounded, but Britain’s objective was achieved.
At a time when public services were renowned for inefficiency, it turned out that the armed forces could still be relied upon.
“We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag,” said Thatcher in the aftermath.
There were some dissenting voices, but that view was widely shared.
In a 1986 episode of Only Fools and Horses, an expatriate South Londoner arrives in the Nag’s Head and begins running down the country: “The stench of defeat’s everywhere,” he says.
“The old place has got no guts anymore.”
And finally Del Boy loses his patience and his temper: “Somebody else said that a little while ago.
A little jumped-up general from Buenos Aires, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get what the Argies got.”
It was also in 1986 that England and Argentina met again in the quarter-final of the World Cup, this time in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City.
It was a difficult time for English football, the very nadir of the hooligan era.
The previous year, 39 fans had been killed in the Heysel Stadium disaster in the European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus, and English clubs had been banned from European competition as a result.
That, combined with the legacy of the Falklands War, ensured that the build-up to the match was dominated by trepidation.
The crowd was largely Mexican, with only around 10,000 fans of the two competing countries expected to be in attendance, but it was announced that there would be 20,000 police in the stadium, including armed plainclothes officers on the terraces.
On one side there were banners proclaiming “Malvinas — always Argentine”, on the other a new chant: “Argentina, Argentina, what’s it like to lose a war?”
The press did their bit.
The Sun ’s front page headline on the day of the match was “It’s War Senor!”, an angle that was mirrored in the Argentine media.
It was left to the footballers to try to keep some sense of perspective.
“We are not taking guns onto the field,” protested Argentina’s star player, Diego Maradona, “we are not going to shoot anyone.
We are going to play football.”
Suggested reading America: land of the cheats
Maradona turned out to be the story of the match with two contrasting goals in the space of five minutes.
The first was a blatant and deliberate handball, the second a sublime piece of dribbling that was later to be voted the Goal of the Century — countered only by a late consolation strike from Gary Lineker.
“Malvinas 2, England 1,” exulted the Argentine press, adding “We blasted the English pirates”, a reference back to the 1966 match, and to the Falklands, when a Buenos Aires paper had depicted Thatcher with an eye-patch.
All this, of course, is ancient history now.
Except that it’s not really.
Argentina continues to lay claim to the Falkland Islands, and this week its foreign minister wrote of the “illegitimate occupation”, renewing the country’s demands for sovereignty talks.
More significant, perhaps, were reports in April that Donald Trump — angered by Keir Starmer’s lack of cooperation in the war against Iran — might withdraw American support for British ownership of the islands.
The British government’s response was a reassertion of the Falklanders’ right to self-determination; memories of the war loom too large for any sensible prime minister to say anything else.
Meanwhile, that first goal in the Azteca — scored, as Maradona himself said, “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God” — has passed into English footballing folklore.
“Same old Argies — always cheating.”
Today’s game, the latest chapter in the saga, sees more at stake than ever: this time it’s a semi-final rather than a quarter-final.
But for 60 years this has been about more than sport, and it still is, even if the mood is nowhere near as volatile as it was in 1986.
The rivalry lives on.
From a British perspective, there’s something a little reassuring about it.
All these years after the Empire collapsed, Britain is still seen as important enough to be denounced as imperialist aggressors.
There’s not even any hint of post-colonial guilt — there was no native population on the Falklands to be slaughtered or oppressed.
The lives that were lost were the consequence of invasion by a dictatorship.
Following its Falklands humiliation, Argentina reverted to democracy, and diplomatic relations with Britain were restored.
The long, shared history of the two countries was soured by the episode, but it hasn’t been lost.
Alongside the mutual suspicion, there’s also a mutual respect.
Maradona was cast by English fans as a pantomime villain, but his genius was never doubted.
His successor, Lionel Messi, is even more gifted and, lacking the street-tough aggression, inspires affection as well as admiration in Britain.
At heart, it remains a family dispute.
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