The Falklands war couldn't happen today – we don't have enough ship builders

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/23/ian-jack-falklands-navy-fleet

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The beer of choice in the Falklands is Budweiser, or so I read this week in the Guardian, in Andy Beckett's account of life on the islands as we approach the 30th anniversary of the war. Beckett had travelled to the settlements of Goose Green and Darwin to see their annual sports week – horse racing, dog trials and sheep-shearing competitions – and there the Budweiser had been especially noticeable, drunk from cans by "heavy-set men in boiler suits, deeply tanned from the neck up". Some things never change, I thought, because I too had been to the same sports week and seen the same kind of men standing next to the same ramshackle little grandstand similarly swigging beer.

That was 34 years ago. In March 1978, the Darwin and Goose Green Sports Association held their centenary meeting, and I travelled with the islands' governor and his wife in a seaplane from Stanley. There were then no roads beyond the capital; the horses at Goose Green's races had been bred from pack animals, which, until the Land Rover arrived, were the Falklands' only land transport. But Land Rovers could take the best part of a day to cover a dozen trackless miles, and a pair of old De Havilland Beaver seaplanes remained the best way to get around.

The governor wore a deerstalker (this was an informal visit; a formal one required a cocked hat) and the pilot was a gruff old Scotsman, perhaps called "Mac". He took the plane over sparkling blue inlets and empty moorland until a few white houses with red roofs came into view at the edge of the sea. When we came ashore, I began to notice the unusual number of empty beer cans that had been tossed into the grass. Later, at a dance, entire tables were densely packed with filled ones. When the men had drunk enough to be reckless, they approached the women, who'd ranged themselves down one wall, and asked them for the pleasure of the next slow foxtrot or samba. Men outnumbered women two to one. "I'd let the Argies have this place tomorrow," a shepherd told me, "if they would just send over a couple of planeloads of women."

The beer then wasn't American. It was Tennent's lager. All across the Falklands, the models on empty Tennent's tins smiled up at you from beach and bog. An off-the-shoulder blouse or a negligee surmounted by a perm, and perfect teeth: Pat Lying Low, Linda in Dreamland, Penny at Night. These were Tennent's lovelies, photographed under the aegis of a Glasgow brewery and now abandoned 7,000 miles from home, too decorous even in 1978, and even in such a womanless place, to beguile anything other than a curious penguin. But at least the beer had been British, drunk by islanders who insisted on their Britishness.

The war four years later upheld that right. In the process, Goose Green got a bloodier name than mutton canning had ever given it, and 255 men serving with the British forces died. The present government's official view is that we would do it all again if we had to. Retired admirals and generals doubt that we could – the question being, what would we do it with? The size of the taskforce that sailed to the South Atlantic 30 years ago could never be assembled now: where would Britain find 42 warships, 22 Royal Fleet Auxiliaries, 62 merchant ships? The taskforce had two aircraft carriers. Today there is none. And more than British sea power has passed away. To inspect the fleet list that shows where each ship was built and by which builder is to remind oneself of an industrial civilisation that now lies beneath the sea like Atlantis.

HMS Fearless, for example: built by Harland and Wolff, Belfast, steam turbines by English Electric. Or HMS Bristol: built by Swan Hunter, Newcastle. Or ill-fated HMS Coventry: built by Cammell Laird in Birkenhead. Or the Glamorgan (Vickers-Armstrong, Newcastle) or the Antrim (Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, Glasgow) or the Argonaut (Hawthorn Leslie, Hebburn on Tyne) or the Yarmouth (John Brown, Clydebank) or the Leeds Castle (Hall Russell, Aberdeen) or the tragic Sir Galahad (Alexander Stephen at Linthouse, Glasgow). Harland's in Belfast and Brown's in Clydebank also supplied the two big liners that were requisitioned as troopships, the Canberra and the QE2, while Barclay Curle in Glasgow built the Uganda that became the hospital ship.

This list could go on. Blythswood, Henry Robb, Yarrow, Scott Lithgow, Vosper's: obscure names today, but generations of workers once knew them. And now, apart from a few sites taken over by BAE Systems, almost all this marine manufacturing has gone. Towns on the old industrial estuaries and rivers still wonder what to do with the wasteground that tilts towards the water: the old slipways. Further back, a heap of brick indicates the ruins of a drawing office or engine house. A local paper headline holds out what passes for hope: "Plans for new superstore."

In the coming weeks, whenever TV documentaries show that fleet of 30 years ago, we might think about the country that built these ships and how remote it now seems to us. It had a far stronger connection to what went before than what has happened since. The keel of the flagship, the carrier Hermes, had been laid down in Barrow in 1944; the design of the torpedoes that sank the Belgrano dated from around the same time. In 1982, it was just possible not to be surprised by these things. Veterans of the second world war were also still a part of the working world, to be found in suits and overalls anywhere from boardrooms to steel mills. The paradox of Mrs Thatcher is that while proclaiming a certain kind of Britishness, built around notions of its unconquerable self, she was destroying the basis of it. Even before the Falklands war was won, there had begun that quick march to industrial dereliction.

At Stanley in 1978 I visited the radio station, and found two versions of the national anthem, one labelled "solemn" and the other "triumphant". I wondered, in the piece I wrote at the time, which version the station would play "when and if the problem of the Falklands is eventually solved". This was too black and white a view. Two years later, Britain and Argentina came up with the solution known as leaseback, which, if it had worked, would have needed a third version of God Save the Queen, one marked "reasonably jolly".

Under leaseback, sovereignty went to Argentina but Britain retained possession under a long lease. The islanders rejected it as an ambiguous and sinister imposition from Whitehall, but we have all learned to live with equally porous notions of nationhood since. What will it mean, for example, if we lease our roads to a Chinese company – perhaps even to China itself – while retaining our "sovereignty" over them? Utilities, transport systems and factories are already substantially owned abroad. If the citizens of a nation state feel they have so little to protect, what then is the point of the navy and the flag?