"}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 \u201can absolutely Victorian jingoist.\u201d Tony Benn found it \u201cembarrassing to live in Britain at the moment.\u201d Intellectuals mostly agreed and expressed their feelings in films, works of art and documentaries. The writer Alan Bennett described it as \u201cthe Last Night of the Proms erected into a policy.\u201d The historian E. P. Thompson predicted that Britain would suffer \u201cfor a long time, in rapes and muggings\u2026in international ill will, and in the stirring up of ugly nationalist sentiment.\u201d The feminist journal Spare Rib denounced Thatcher\u2019s display of \u201cmale power.\u201d The Established Church had to be pressed hard to hold a service of \u201cthanksgiving\u201d rather than \u201creconciliation\u201d at St. Paul\u2019s. For some their alienation from a country whose mood they disliked was deepened\u2014better a country in decline than one revived by the \u201cFalklands factor\u201d and the tabloid Sun. R. W. Johnson in the New Statesman (17 June 1982) dissented, echoing Orwell in 1940: the left \u201chave always proclaimed their hatred of military aggression and of fascism\u2026But when it comes to the crunch they find they hate a right-wing Tory prime minister even more.\u201d Left-wing historians produced works deconstructing British and English national identity and what they saw as the malign legacy of empire and \u201cChurchillism.\u201d Some realized that they had fundamentally misjudged how most people felt. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm thought there had been \u201ca public sentiment that could actually be felt\u201d and \u201canyone of the Left who was not aware of this grassroots feeling\u2026ought seriously to consider his or her capacity to assess politics.\u201d