The Sunday Times Magazine • 25their unusual predicament and will joke
about deliveries gone wrong — stale
cornflakes and walnut whirls soaked in spilt
creosote. Risible wi-fi speeds would make
the place unliveable for your average
London millennial: a strong connection
costs upwards of £1,200 a year, and even
then you’d struggle to sustain Netflix. One
of the most heated recent debates on the
(often heated) community Facebook group
was about potentially moving away from
the current Sure South Atlantic satellite
connection to Elon Musk’s Starlink.
The Falklands accent is an unusual
mixture of West Country warble and New
Zealand twang that linguists assure me is
the result of something called a diphthong
shift. But the idiosyncrasies of life on the
Falklands go far deeper than just outlandish
accents and exorbitantly priced mushrooms.
The unique environmental, geopolitical and
economic forces at work here have forged
a society full of apparent contradictions. The
welfare state is Scandi socialist, with free
education and healthcare for all, but foreign
policy is firmly flag-waving Thatcherite
(a bust of the Iron Lady stands down the
road from the Cross of Sacrifice in central
Stanley, just in front of Thatcher Drive).
The Falklands is the epitome of Global
Britain — a far-flung projection of
postimperial force, yet it would have been
ardently Remain had it voted in the
referendum because so much of its
produce is processed (and now faces tariffs)
in Europe. It is a fish barony with almost no
fishermen living in it. A village-sized country
whose legislative assembly members act asboth local councillors and global diplomats.
Even the Benniest yokel has a firm and
well-informed opinion on Argentine and
British dispositions towards the Falklands.
They have to pay attention.
And yet, despite all these quirks and
challenges, somehow it all works fairly well.
There are issues, of course. The Falklands
prison is unusually full at the moment, after
Operation Cinnamon led to multiple
arrests on the islands for underage sex
crimes. Locals will grumble about the
overmighty governor and his “colonialist”
ways. Some younger Falklanders sense
racism and bigotry among the older
generation, much as they do in Britain. Life
in Stanley is stifling for those used to the
city: as with any village population, secrets
don’t last long and scandal spreads quickly.
“People mostly drink a bit too much and
shag each other,” is how one local puts it.
Yet most Falklanders look at Britain today
— immigration woes, Brexit animosities,
Covid horrors, cost-of-living crisis, huge
national debt, rife inequality — and consider
themselves rather fortunate. One particularly
notable aspect of Falklands life is that after
their five or six-year fully funded rumspringa
in the UK, the majority of young Falklanders
return home. (Thanks to an act passed after
the war, Falklanders do have full rights to
British citizenship, whereas migrants
coming the other way from the UK or
elsewhere need to apply for residency visas.)
Glyn Morrison, 21, spent three years at
a technical college in the UK, but he never
really considered staying. Why? “You have
a freedom here that you just don’t get inthe UK,” he says. “You’re used to a quiet
place, but it’s also developing here at a rate
that’s unreal, so you’re not just stuck in a
rut. It’s the lifestyle. It’s being able to look
up and see the stars. It’s the fresh air you
breathe the moment you get off the plane.
It draws you back.”
A plot of land in Stanley generally costs
about £20,000 and building a house
roughly £100,000. Morrison works as
a construction site engineer and says
there are 100 empty plots waiting for
development: “We can’t keep up.” Like
many Falklanders, Morrison’s prized
possession is not his home but his Land
Rover, three of them in fact, and he spends
all his spare cash fixing up his fleet.
Prior to the pandemic weekly flights
would arrive from Chile, sometimes via
Argentina, as well as the “Airbridge” flight
run twice weekly from the UK out of RAF
Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, which takes
civilians and military personnel down to
the islands. But when the pandemic arrived
the Falklands went full zero Covid:
commercial flights were shut down and
UK arrivals were subjected to strict
quarantine. Because of the Falklands’ size,
isolation, well-oiled medical services and
vaccination rates above 90 per cent, life
here has been blissfully free of masks,
mandates and Covid deaths.
The two years of almost total isolation
gave the Falklanders a chance to get to know
their own islands better. Despite the rural
image the vast majority of Falklanders
actually live in Stanley, also known as
“town”, and only a hardy few live in the
outlying farms and settlements known as
“camp”, an anglicisation of the Spanish
campo, or countryside.
The Falklands version of Eat Out to Help
Out was the “Trip” (Tourism Recovery
Incentive Programme), which gave each
adult £500 and children £250 to travel
around the islands, taking the tiny air taxis
that ferry passengers from island to island,
keeping tourism alive in the absence
of the usual 60,000 annual visitors.Scandal spreads quickly here.
“People mostly drink a bit too
much and shag each other,”
is how one local puts it
The Queen’s birthday parade in Stanley is
a reminder of the islands’ colonial historyGlyn Morrison, left, spends his spare cash
maintaining his three beloved Land Roversgeorgina strange for the sunday times magazine ➤