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Robert Tombs on the opponents of the Falklands War:

The Falklands victory did not, however, mean a new spirit of national unity. It won vilification as well as praise for Thatcher. The mainly left-wing minority (with a few dissident Tories and Liberals) who had opposed the war were bitter at what they saw as the whipping up of militaristic nationalism by “an absolutely Victorian jingoist.” Tony Benn found it “embarrassing to live in Britain at the moment.” Intellectuals mostly agreed and expressed their feelings in films, works of art and documentaries. The writer Alan Bennett described it as “the Last Night of the Proms erected into a policy.” The historian E. P. Thompson predicted that Britain would suffer “for a long time, in rapes and muggings…in international ill will, and in the stirring up of ugly nationalist sentiment.” The feminist journal Spare Rib denounced Thatcher’s display of “male power.” The Established Church had to be pressed hard to hold a service of “thanksgiving” rather than “reconciliation” at St. Paul’s. For some their alienation from a country whose mood they disliked was deepened—better a country in decline than one revived by the “Falklands factor” and the tabloid Sun. R. W. Johnson in the New Statesman (17 June 1982) dissented, echoing Orwell in 1940: the left “have always proclaimed their hatred of military aggression and of fascism…But when it comes to the crunch they find they hate a right-wing Tory prime minister even more.” Left-wing historians produced works deconstructing British and English national identity and what they saw as the malign legacy of empire and “Churchillism.” Some realized that they had fundamentally misjudged how most people felt. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm thought there had been “a public sentiment that could actually be felt” and “anyone of the Left who was not aware of this grassroots feeling…ought seriously to consider his or her capacity to assess politics.”