A Surfeit of Setbacks

When Britain's Parliament adjourned for its summer recess at the end of last week, nobody would have been surprised to see its Conservative members run --not walk--to the exits. Prime Minister Edward Heath's fifth week in office had been marked by one bad break after another: a continuing dock strike, an untimely death in the Prime Minister's official family, a Commonwealth-wide uproar over the proposed sale of arms to South Africa, and the most serious act of violence in the hallowed House of Commons since Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was shot to death in a lobby there in 1812. On top of all that, complaints were beginning to be voiced that Heath's deliberate, coolly cautious style could merely be a mask for inaction.

Heath's supporters argued that in many respects the new Prime Minister was doing rather well. Northern Ireland was quieter, and last week the Ulster government banned all processions for six months, reducing the likelihood of renewed rioting. Maintaining his reputation as a superb administrator and delegator of authority, Heath cut his predecessor's swollen ministerial list, reducing the Cabinet from 21 to 18 and top non-Cabinet posts from 78 to 66. He also ordered a searching systems analysis of Whitehall's decision-making machinery, using top management experts recruited from private business. With care, he began charting measures to deal with "stagflation," the combination of stagnation and inflation inherited from Harold Wilson's Labor government. Then troubles came quickly.

THE STRIKE: After the failure of last-minute negotiations two weeks ago, 47,000 longshoremen walked off the job, tying up 40 ports. The dockers were demanding an 80% increase in their base wage from $24.60 to $48 a week, plus work rules that would vastly complicate the long overdue modernization of Britain's vital ports. Employers pointed out that dockers had been taking home an average of $86 for five ten-hour days and that overtime and fringes were so tied to the base pay that labor's demands, if met, would increase most British shipping costs by some 50%.

Longshoremen in Holland, Belgium, Norway and Sweden, meanwhile, refused to handle Britain-bound cargo, and other dockers seemed likely to follow their example. In Northern Ireland, dockers attacked fishermen who had been running supplies of Irish bacon and eggs into Britain, dumping the goods into harbors and scattering them on beaches. As supplies of bananas, oranges, grapes and vegetables dwindled all over the United Kingdom, prices rose; some meat cost as much as a shilling (12-c-) a pound more. Dutch and Belgian truck farmers and shippers complained of losing millions of dollars. The government could, of course, use troops to move goods, and preliminary legal moves were made in this direction. But such an action would sorely test the patience and patriotism of other workers, and Britons remembered uneasily the 1926 General Strike.

THE DEATH: Heath was relying heavily on Iain Macleod, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to draft the blueprint for a new Tory economic structure, to overhaul the tax system and to restore incentives so as to "release the energies of the people." But last week Macleod died suddenly at 56 of a heart attack following an appendectomy from which he had seemed to be recuperating nicely. Macleod and Heath were charter members of the "One Nation" Group formed by liberal Tories in 1950. Borrowing Disraeli's philosophy as well as his phraseology, they sought to destroy the image of the Conservatives as a party of businessmen and bluebloods. Macleod became a close friend and political ally of Heath, and more recently, his next-door neighbor at No. 11 Downing Street, the official residence of the Treasury chief.

Banker, barrister, bridge expert, editor and writer, Macleod had an immense breadth of experience. In previous Tory governments he had served as Minister of Health and of Labor, and, as Colonial Secretary in the early 1960s, had helped one African colony after another to independence. Macleod was too radical to suit the crustier members of his party and was bypassed as Tory leader in 1963, yet he was all but irreplaceable. To succeed him, Heath appointed Anthony Barber, 50, Chairman of the Tory Party since 1967 and current top British negotiator with the Common Market.

THE ARMS UPROAR: The Tories' third misfortune was more of their own making. It involved the delicate balance of Commonwealth relations. Sensitive to the feelings of non-white Commonwealth members, and acknowledging resolutions of the United Nations against apartheid, Harold Wilson banned the sale of British arms to South Africa in 1964. The Tories indicated that, if elected, they might agree to resume arms sales for "external defense," as provided for by the Simonstown Agreement of 1955. Under that pact, Britain had sold some $50 million worth of warships in return for naval base facilities on South Africa's strategic coast.

The Tories maintained that if Britain wanted to retain its South African naval facilities as a counterweight to the growing Soviet presence in the Indian Ocean, a resumption of arms sales was necessary. But the government failed to present its case convincingly to the Commonwealth, and a storm boiled up. Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia lodged strong protests, and Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere threatened to withdraw from the Commonwealth. By the time the issue came before the House, it was clear that the government had been blown off course. The opposition so rattled Sir Alec Douglas-Home that the Foreign Secretary twice called Harold Wilson "the Prime Minister." Voting on a Labor motion opposing the deal, Heath's government survived its first serious parliamentary test, 313 to 281.

THE BOMBS: To top off a bad week, a young man later identified as a construction worker from Northern Ireland stood up in the visitors' gallery of the House of Commons, shouted something about Belfast, where British troops have used tear gas to quell rioting Catholics and Protestants, and hurled two canisters onto the floor. The bombs rolled and bounced around, spewing dense clouds of tear gas and setting off two small fires. Members and visitors dashed retching from the floor, strewing papers right and left. Afterward, nobody seemed able to agree on just what the man had said. Some witnesses thought they heard him cry: "Belfast: see how you like it!" Another said it was: "How do you like that, you bastards? Now you know what it's like in Belfast." And an American visitor, who had been sitting next to the terrorist in the gallery, heard: "You can have a taste of it! This is what it was like in Belfast."

In any case, no one was seriously injured, and an hour and a half later, M.P.s were back on their benches. Before long they resumed, discussion, appropriately, on a point of order concerning the swearing-in of the House's youngest member, Firebrand Bernadette Devlin, 23, now serving a six-month jail sentence in Armagh, Northern Ireland, for rioting and inciting to riot during last summer's disturbances in Ulster. Hansard, the official parliamentary record, took note of the bombing with a single word: "Interruption."

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