Britain Off and Running

By Frederick Painton

Is Britain depressed and divided? Is it buoyantly forging ahead? Or is it ^ simply muddling through? As the country launched into a 24-day parliamentary- election campaign last week, the portraits that political leaders painted of their country were starkly different -- and the conflicting images at once turned into political battle flags. To the strains of Brahms' Fourth Symphony in London's Queen Elizabeth Conference Center, Neil Kinnock, the leader of the opposition Labor Party, strode onto the podium to describe a joyless, divided Britain, an "economically and socially disabled" country afflicted with Dickensian misery. Two hours later, at Conservative Party headquarters near Westminster Abbey, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, at the helm for the past eight years, evoked a very different nation, one with "revived spirit and restored reputation," a land that could boast of being Western Europe's "fastest-growing economy." The previous day, Britain's third political force, the Social Democratic-Liberal Party Alliance, had outlined a more subdued picture, acknowledging Thatcher's economic achievements but judging their social and human costs to be intolerable. Their program, said S.D.P. Leader David Owen, was the "achievable dream."

Thatcher, 61, had chosen June 11 as polling day to ride an evident swelling of Conservative Party strength. When she made the decision to take the country to the ballot box 13 months before the end of her five-year term, her party held a 13% lead over Labor in the polls. By the time the campaign got under way last week, the margin had shrunk, with polls showing the Conservatives at around 42% to Labor's 33%. The Alliance hovered at 25%.

Despite her lead, Thatcher is vulnerable, especially at a time when the British electorate has turned volatile and unpredictable. That condition has been linked by a Leeds University research center to the growing role of television in election campaigns. Moreover, Britons seem less inclined to follow a traditional pattern of voting along class lines, and they now have three rather than two major parties from which to choose. Perhaps not surprisingly, opinion polls show Thatcher to be both the most respected and the least liked of the main party leaders. While supporters regard the Prime Minister with something approaching awe, opponents like to caricature her as a hectoring nanny or, worse, a leader insensitive to the needs of the poor and the unemployed. At 10.9%, or 3 million people, the number of jobless, for example, is up dramatically from the 4.3%, or 1.1 million, when Thatcher took over in 1979. Labor Leader Kinnock calls the unemployment situation a "lead weight of misery dragging down the British economy." Thatcher's attitude, he said last week, would lead Britain to have "beggars in the street and young boys on the run in the city, to people dying for lack of warmth in their own homes." The Church of England and even some patrician Tory leaders have become persistent critics of Thatcher's social policies, particularly in education and health care.

Flanked by ten Cabinet ministers, Thatcher presented the Tories' 77-page program during her appearance at party headquarters. She regards the manifesto not only as the answer to her critics but also as the next phase of what she considers her unfinished revolution. In that revolution, she sees the welfare- state mentality overtaken by a renewed sense of competition and the labor unions that once challenged government authority shorn of their excessive power. Said Thatcher: "If anyone hoped to attack the Conservative Party for running out of ideas after two periods of office, this manifesto puts paid to that."

The Prime Minister described her program as containing "real, radical policies for the next Parliament," with the key theme "power to the people." Said she: "We intend to spread ownership of homes, shares and pensions even more widely. We shall continue to sell industries back to the people. We want to extend greater choice in services like housing and education."

As for attacks on her as being heartless and insensitive to the ills of society, she declared the next day that "all decent people care about the sick, the unfortunate and the old. It is false and wicked to suggest otherwise." The choice, she said, is between those who complained and wrung their hands but failed to create the resources to help, and her own Tories, whose economic accomplishments provided the means for effective welfare.

Appealing to the pocketbook vote, the Tories underlined their achievements in a slick 26-page electoral pamphlet and in a flood of positive statistics. Among the gains: two-thirds of Britons own their homes today, up from 50% when Thatcher assumed office. Car ownership has risen from 54% to 66%. The number of Britons who are stockholders has almost tripled, from 7% to 20%, and the number of those who consider themselves to belong to the middle class has increased from 30% of the population to roughly 50% over the past eight years. Inflation has been cut from 18% to 4%. The Thatcher government has privatized state enterprises valued at nearly $30 billion.

Kinnock, 44, trim and combative and sporting in his lapel a red rose -- the Labor Party's new symbol -- was ebullient as he launched his campaign. It was notably different from the one that led to Labor's humiliating defeat in 1983 under his predecessor, Michael Foot. The Labor manifesto, titled Britain Will Win, ran a trim 17 pages, in contrast to 40 for the 1983 catalog of promises.

Gone were pledges to abolish the House of Lords, to nationalize huge segments of industry and to control private banking policy. Labor's highest priority this time: reduce unemployment by 1 million within two years, at a cost of $10 billion, mainly through public works programs. Kinnock also stood by his party's unilateral nuclear-disarmamen t position -- even though it remains an electoral liability. The Tories charged that Labor "would abandon the defense policy followed by every British government, Labor or Conservative, since World War II." Said Social Democratic Leader Owen: "On defense, Labor remains a menace to its allies and the answer to the Russians' prayer."

Within two hours of presenting his party's manifesto, Kinnock embarked on a four-day campaign swing through the depressed Northwest, trying to wrest marginal seats from the Conservatives. In attacking the credibility of the Thatcher government, he challenged the Prime Minister's claim that industrial productivity had improved under her administration. "If what the government has done is increase productivity," said Kinnock, "then having a leg cut off is losing weight."

The challenge by the Alliance makes the election outcome particularly unpredictable. Barely organized and little more than an experiment four years ago, the coalition still pulled in 8 million votes, 25% of the total cast and only 2% less than the Labor Party's popular tally. But because of Britain's winner-take-all electoral system, the Alliance won only 23 seats, against 397 for the Tories and 209 for Labor.

Yet even small shifts in a few key districts could produce significant changes. As the Alliance puts it in the introduction to its manifesto, "If just five more people in every 100 support us, we would have over 70 seats and almost certainly the balance of power ((in Parliament))." Robert Worcester, chairman of the MORI polling organization, believes "only two people in 100 in key marginal seats have to change their vote to the Alliance from the Conservatives to produce a hung Parliament."*

Owen and Liberal Party Leader David Steel jumped the gun on the campaign by 24 hours because they feared their joint program would be lost in the hoopla over the manifestoes of the two larger parties. Not surprisingly, the Alliance called for constitutional reform that would introduce proportional representation and thus provide for a more equitable distribution of parliamentary seats. The Alliance also proposes more public spending than the Tories, but less than Labor. Like Labor, however, the coalition has been vulnerable on the issue of defense ever since a split last year between the Social Democrats and the Liberals over maintaining Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. Steel, whose Liberals wanted to scrap the missiles, has since agreed to a compromise with Owen favoring the maintenance of a minimum nuclear deterrent until atomic weaponry could be negotiated away as part of a global arms-reduction process. While the bigger parties were announcing their manifestoes, the two Davids boarded separate gold-colored "battle buses" outfitted with sophisticated communications equipment and emblazoned in foot- high letters with the slogan THE TIME HAS COME. Owen noted with pleasure that "people want us to do well even if they aren't going to vote for us." At a rally in Cardiff, he declared, "Labor is unelectable, but that cannot mean that the Conservatives are irreplaceable." Traveling back from Cambridge on his bus, Steel said, "Whatever the Tory and Labor parties say now, if there is a hung Parliament, I have no doubt that they would talk to us about a shared government."

Thatcher dismisses such a possibility. She expects to spend four or five hours each campaign day in a blue-painted, high-tech campaign bus, in effect a traveling Prime Minister's office, that is inscribed on all four sides with the words MOVING FORWARD WITH MAGGIE. During a brief campaign excursion last week to London's renovated docklands area, Thatcher, professing herself delighted with her lavishly equipped vehicle, climbed into the driver's seat. That, politically speaking, is, of course, where she intends to stay.

FOOTNOTE: *In which no single party wins an absolute majority in the House of Commons.

With reporting by Frank Melville/Cambridge and Christopher Ogden/London