Monday, Jul. 27, 1970
Hardly a Honeymoon
One thing that Britain's Conservatives did not manage to win in their stunning election upset last month was a reasonably long political honeymoon. Last week, less than a month after Prime Minister Edward Heath had moved his things into No. 10 Downing Street, he was coping with not one but two major crises.
In Northern Ireland, where the anniversary of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne River offered an excuse for a renewed outbreak of religious warfare between Protestants and Catholics, the new government deployed one of the largest security details ever assembled in the British Isles. There were Sioux helicopters, Saracen armored cars, 11,000 troops imported from posts as far away as Malta and West Germany and 7,000 police. As one senior army officer put it, "a sparrow could not have coughed without being arrested." Though more than 100,000 Protestants donned bowler hats for Orange Order parades in such potential trouble spots as Belfast, Londonderry, Maghera and Armagh, there was no violence. The only casualties of the week came three days later, when a bomb planted in a Belfast bank by an unknown terrorist hurt 31 bystanders.
Red Trade Balance. Heath's government was less effective in Britain itself, where a collapse in labor negotiations closed the nation's 40 major ports as 47,000 dockworkers walked off their jobs in the first nationwide dock strike since the massive general strike of 1926. Rushing home from her ten-day visit to Canada, Queen Elizabeth II signed a state-of-emergency proclamation less than ten minutes after her arrival at Buckingham Palace. Armed with that authority, the new Tory government prepared to call out some 36,500 troops to move perishables, medicines and mail at deserted ports from Southampton to Glasgow, where more than 150 ships lay idle.
No one is venturing any guesses on whether the strike could last the 40 days that some labor leaders have mentioned, but food is not an immediate problem. Shortages in some meats, including lamb and beef, could show up within a fortnight, but Britain has a two-month supply of such items as butter, wheat, bacon, cheese and sugar. The country is in less danger of going hungry than of falling back into economic straits. A long strike could shut down steel mills for lack of ore, then close auto plants whose exports earned -L- 1 billion last year. Already the strike is bottling up exports worth $57 million a day, menacing Britain's still fragile trade balance. Just two days before the strike, the government reported that in June the balance of trade was in the red for the third month in a row; the deficit, $122 million, was the worst in 15 months.
Harold Understands. One reason for the continuing trade problems has been the failure of past governments to curb Britain's chronic wildcat walkouts, of which the dock strike is an outstanding example. British dockers already take home an average $84 a week, so hopes of a peaceful settlement were high early on, when union leaders endorsed management offers of a 4% to 7% increase. Those hopes crumbled, however, when rank-and-file insurgents, demanding pay increases closer to 80%, rejected the package and led dockers off the piers. Jack Jones, head of the 1,500,000-member Transport and General Workers Union, could only make the strike official and protest lamely that "we are not trying to wreck the economy.''
The strike could do just that, particularly if it lasts much longer than the annual two-week vacation shutdown that fortuitously is to begin in many British plants this week. Under the terms of the state-of-emergency laws, invoked only six times in the past 50 years.* Heath can order troops to move essential cargoes, set ceilings on food prices and ration vital supplies. In Commons, the new Prime Minister got a pledge of support from none other than his Labor predecessor, Harold Wilson, who rose to observe that "we understand the very grave situation." Well he should. The seamen's strike that closed Britain's ports for 45 days in 1966 badly upset the country's balance of payments, hastened the devaluation of the British pound in 1967, and contributed to the loss of confidence that crushed Labor in 1970.
*In the 1921 miners' strike, the 1926 general strike, the wildcat dock strikes of 1948 and 1949, the 1955 railroad strike and the 1966 seaman's strike.
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