The BBC just cannot help themselves

From the BBC's article entitled 'How did Doctor Who reflect the real world?':

The first David Tennant story, The Christmas Invasion, contains a scene which echoes former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's decision to sink the General Belgrano during the Falklands conflict in 1982.

Penelope Wilton's prime minister orders the destruction of a retreating alien spaceship, a decision condemned by the Doctor.

Doctor Who during the Russell T. Davies years often had politial echoes, this was one of the most clumsy. It was also perpetrtinga falsehood as the Argentinian ship's captain and others have admitted that The Belgarano was not retreating...

La Nación published a reader's letter from Admiral Enrique Molina Pico (head of the Argentine Navy in the 1990s) in 2005 in which Pico wrote that the Belgrano was part of an operation that posed a real threat to the British task force, but was holding off for tactical reasons. Pico added that "To leave the exclusion zone was not to leave the combat zone to enter a protected area". Pico explicitly stated that the sinking was not a war crime, but a combat action.^[48]

The Belgrano's captain, Héctor Bonzo, (in) an interview in 2003... stated that the General Belgrano was only temporarily sailing to the west at the time of the attack, and his orders were to attack any British ships which came within range of cruiser's armament.^[51]

The BBC, any excuse to blacken the name of Lady Thatcher and the British Armed Forces, truth be damned.