It helped that the tiny Falklands population that was serving this microcosmic function was almost entirely white – a ‘British people’ that no longer existed – and that this ‘British territory’ was an almost entirely rural landscape. The Falklands was a kind of make-believe England with no black and brown immigrants. Its pre-industrial terrain was a fantasy version of the post-industrial landscape that Thatcher herself was in fact creating at home in England, without the empty steel plants and rusting machines. The Falklands was literally pastoral – home to 400,000 sheep and their shepherds –
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