David Cameron disses the Pope

Egged on by who else but The Daily Mail, British PM David Cameron has renewed his tilt towards populism by taking issue with Pope Francis's views on the Falklands/Malvinas.  While he was still Archbishop of Buenos Aires, His Holiness opined that the UK had "usurped" the islands.  Cameron says that the Pope is wrong about this.  Hey Dave, don't you know the Pope is infallible?*

Cameron cracked a laboured white smoke joke while referring to the recent referendum in which the islanders were asked whether they wished to remain a UK protectorate.  In the kind of result not usually seen outside North Korea, 99.8% responded in the affirmative.  Take that, Francis!

I've written about the Falklands/Malvinas before.  Argentina's claim is based solely on geography, as its peoples have never inhabited the islands on a continuous basis.  Even the name is French rather than Spanish in origin: it was imparted by fishermen from St Malo.  The UK's claim is based on continuous occupation, but that occupation, whether Cameron likes it or not, initially took place in the era of colonialism.  Now the UK attitude echoes that of Ronald Reagan when he talked about the Panama Canal:  "It's ours. we stole it fair and square."

Here's the thing about that referendum result.  If you take a bunch of your citizens, plunk them in a faraway place, turn that place into an armed camp and pump in prodigious amounts of taxpayers' money, how else would you expect them to vote?  Before Argentina attempted to invade the islands back in 1981, the Thatcher government had actually been considering ways of accommodating Buenos Aires's demands.  The invasion served to harden British attitudes, and they have shown no sign of softening even slightly in the past three decades.  With UK politics starting to move into pre-election mode, it's going to take a lot more than a pronouncement from the Pope to change that.


* I'm joking.  Catholic doctrine is that the Pope is only infallible when speaking ex cathedra on doctrinal matters.  His opinions on the weather or on politics are no better or worse than anyone else's.  Since the doctrine of infallibility was promulgated in the mid-19th century, the cumulative number of infallible pronouncements made by all subsequent Pontiffs is....one.