ABSTRACT
In the summer o f 1982 the liberal and socialist press in Britain was swamped with agonised articles discussing the implications o f ‘Falklands fever’ . H ow was it, R. W. Johnson enquired in New Society, that events like the Falklands crisis seemed to redound inevitably to the advantage o f the British Right, while serving only to expose the ‘natural defeatism o f Liberal intellectuals’? Why was it, wrote Jerem y Seabrook and Trevor Blackwell in the New Statesman, that British radicals appeared so often insensitive to outbursts o f popular patriotism, responding at best with embar rassment and at worst with downright hostility?1
