Whatever England’s World Cup result, our Government has to stop ignoring Argentina’s sabre rattling over Falklands

HOW lovely to know that members of the Argentinian football team have been preparing for their World Cup semi-final against England tomorrow by focusing wholly on their sporting skills. Footage has emerged of the team celebrating its victory over Egypt by chanting “I was born in Argentina, land of Diego and Lionel, and of the Malvinas lads whom I’ll never forget”. The Malvinas, of course, is what Argentinians like to call the Falklands Islands, the British Overseas Territory which the country invaded in 1982 before a British task force recaptured the islands. But evidently the players are in no mood to let bygones be bygones, and remarkably Fifa doesn’t seem minded to intervene, despite having a rule that is supposed to banish political images and chanting from stadiums. One group of England supporters in the States even had their flag confiscated because it contained the image of a submarine — though it was simply a reference to the proud industry of their Cumbrian home town, Barrow-in-Furness. But then, as we have all discovered in recent days — not least the Egyptians, who lost after having a spectacular goal disallowed on the grounds of a minor piece of shirt-pulling 17 seconds earlier, before an Argentinian goal was allowed to stand in spite of a similar foul in the build-up — it does seem to be one Fifa rule for Argentina and another for everyone else. Read More on Opinion I have every confidence that our own football team will rise above grubby politics when they take to the field tomorrow night. Hopefully they will win the game in an emphatic way which not even a controversial VAR decision could overturn. Nor, if we are lucky, will an Argentinian player seek to emulate Diego Maradona, surely the most tarnished of all “great” footballers, and punch the ball into the back of the net — another incident, from the 1986 World Cup, which a Fifa refereeing team somehow failed to see. Once this World Cup is over, however, our own Government is going to have to come up with a firm response to the latest Argentinian sabre-rattling over the Falklands. Most read in The Sun Andy Burnham, who will almost certainly be Prime Minister by then, could ignore a few chanting footballers, but not the Argentinian Foreign Minister, Pablo Quirno, who has chosen the occasion of a football match to relaunch a claim for the Falklands. “Time does not transform an illegitimate occupation into sovereignty,” he wrote in a Buenos Aires newspaper. “Our claim will not be relinquished, resigned or abandoned.” The Falkland Islanders, he added, have been “artificially implanted” there. How disappointing that the current government of Argentina should descend into this kind of nationalistic fist-waving. In 1982 Argentina was living under the tinpot dictatorship of General Galtieri, who invaded the islands in a misguided effort to boost his position by stirring up national pride and who was later jailed for sending his countrymen to their deaths. Now it is governed by the administration of Javier Milei, the freely elected, chainsaw-wielding president, who has done so much to try to end the cycle of corruption and fiscal irresponsibility which had turned the country into an inflation-ridden basket case. Argentina should be one of the richest countries in the world in terms of GDP per capita, as it indeed was 100 years ago. Then, it looked to be on the same economic trajectory as Australia, yet that was all thrown away through decades of misgovernment. It is now reduced to being a middle income country, whose middle-class has had its wealth diminished through repeated bouts of hyperinflation. No doubt many Argentinians would be thrilled if their country took sovereignty of the Falklands, but I suspect a lot would be even more thrilled if they were able to rebuild their personal wealth with the help of a booming economy and healthy public finances. That’s where their government’s efforts should be focused. Argentina’s claim to be the rightful owners of the Falklands is bunk. This in not a case of Imperial Britain invading an existing country and colonising it. The Falklands were uninhabited when Britain first established a garrison there in the 1760s — other than a rival garrison on another part of the islands put there by the French. The Argentines only started sizing up the islands for commercial activities such as whaling 50 years later, but even then the islands had no permanent population. That was only established through British settlement. Needless to say, the people who live there now almost unanimously want to be British. In a referendum held in 2013 all but three of the island’s 1,500 voters said they wished the islands to remain a British overseas territory. Quirno claims that the referendum was illegitimate because it was organised “unilaterally” by the British. Of course it was; it is British territory. In any case, does he really think the result would have been any different had Argentina had a hand in organising the poll? I do, though, recognise the result may well have been different had Argentinian officials been invited to count the votes. Tomorrow, we will hopefully be able to enjoy a football match between two of the best teams in the world, without politics getting too much in the way. May the best team win, and without the aid of controversial refereeing decisions. But whatever the result, it is not going to change the reality that the people of the Falkland Islands wish to be British and that Argentina has no right to suggest that be taken away from them.