Oof! Pow! Bam! Thwack!

By Russ Hoyle

The gloves come off as Campaign '83 starts fast and ugly

As the rolling, majestic cadences of Rule Britannia sounded in London's packed Conservative Party headquarters, a confident Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 57, strode to the podium to fire the first official salvo in Britain's surprise 1983 election campaign. Flanked by Cabinet ministers, beneath a bright blue banner proclaiming the new Tory slogan BRITAIN STRONG AND FREE, Thatcher lost no time -- and squandered no politesse--in proclaiming her determination to "ensure that Britain remains a steadfast ally in an uncertain world." She unveiled a manifesto that would further toughen Tory policies on trade unionism, denationalization of state-run industries and big-city metropolitan councils. In so doing, Thatcher drew the battle lines with the opposition Labor Party in the bleakest terms. "The choice before the nation is stark," she intoned, "either to continue our present progress toward recovery or to follow policies more extreme and more damaging than those ever put forward by any previous opposition."

While the Tory campaign machinery hummed into action, opposition candidates took to the hustings to mount fiery attacks of their own. Before a half-filled house at Glasgow's cavernous Apollo Theater, Labor Party Leader Michael Foot, 69, lashed out at the Prime Minister's economic policies. "Thatcherism is the most appalling economic mess in generations!" he shouted. "The industrial destruction she has inflicted upon this country is even worse than Hitler's bombings." Campaigning in the economically depressed West Midlands, Deputy Labor Party Leader Denis Healey discovered a mechanical crab at a street market and held it up before TV cameras. "It moves sideways and evades your every instruction," he joked. "I'm going to call it Sir Geoffrey Howe." That swipe at Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer made the evening news programs. Said Healey: "Margaret Thatcher has turned the Tory Party into her personal dictatorship."

Even Social Democratic Party Leader Roy Jenkins, who would become Prime Minister in the unlikely event of a victory by the centrist S.D.P./Liberal Alliance, dropped his usually temperate mien to blast Thatcher. Jenkins acidly compared her new Tory manifesto to Field Marshal Douglas Haig's message after the disastrous Battle of the Somme in 1916: "Ground gained negligible, casualties intolerable, but press on."

With those stinging volleys, Britain's brief election season opened on a decidedly contentious note. The harsh rhetoric was hardly surprising. Thatcher's decision to cut short her five-year term and call elections for June 9 was calculated to take advantage of disarray within the Labor Party and exploit the image of Foot as an ineffectual leader. With the inflation rate hovering at 4%, down from a high of 22% in 1980, Thatcher gambled that British voters would not want to risk jeopardizing an economic recovery, or Britain's commitment to a strong nuclear defense, by electing a Labor government committed to what she considers the dangerously quixotic schemes of Labor's left wing. The Labor manifesto, written by the party's left over the opposition of moderates, calls for a huge jobs-creation program, a ban on nuclear weapons, and withdrawal from the European Community. Thatcher's bet seemed safe: last week's Market and Opinion Research International (MORI) poll showed the Tories with 46% of the vote, Labor with 37% and the Alliance with 16%. Thatcher's margin over Labor was down 6 percentage points from the previous week's MORI poll, but London bookmakers were still giving 7-to-l odds that the Prime Minister would be reelected.

Despite Thatcher's lead, the four-week campaign, coming at a time of record postwar unemployment of 13.6%, promises to be the most volatile and divisive in decades. Foot's reception in industrial centers such as Glasgow and Liverpool heartened Labor strategists. When he took aim at one of Thatcher's strongest electoral assets, the memory of her conduct of the Falklands war, by accusing her of "exploiting the deaths of young men who died in the Falklands," he drew thunderous applause. "Get her out, Michael!" shouted a young worker in Blackburn. Predicted Labor M.P. Eric Heffer: "This is going to be a dirty election."

In her opening press conference, Thatcher acknowledged that the high level of joblessness was her "most intractable" problem. She insisted that the "answer is not bogus social contracts and government overspending," but a resolve "to keep inflation down and offer real incentive for private enterprise." According to most public opinion polls, voters blame unemployment more on the worldwide recesssion than on the Thatcher government's fiscal policies.

The Prime Minister also renewed her pledge to control inflation, cut income taxes and maintain Britain's membership in the European Community. Any attempt to pull out of the Community, she said, would "put at risk millions of jobs." Thatcher promised to denationalize such major government-owned companies as British Airways, Rolls-Royce and British Telecom. She made it equally plain that a new Thatcher government would stand by its commitment to improve Britain's nuclear deter rent by buying U.S.-built, submarine-launched Trident missiles and would continue to support the planned deployment of U.S. cruise missiles at the British bases at Greenham Common and Molesworth.

Thatcher aimed her sharpest thrusts at the heart of the Labor Party, the trade unions. She pledged to "bring democracy to the shop-floor workers" by introducing legislation that would require union leaders to stand for re-election every five years and call strikes only by secret ballot. The proposals represent a direct challenge to entrenched left-wing leaders who have dominated the labor movement recently.

At each stop last week, Foot and other Labor officials hammered away at their only potent issue: the Thatcher record on unemployment. The party's first ten-minute televised campaign message effectively focused on the plight of young jobless workers. The centerpiece of the Labor campaign is a five-year crash program to create 2.5 million new jobs, mainly by diverting some $17 billion now spent on unemployment benefits and tax-revenue losses. Other savings, according to the Labor platform, would come from scrapping the Thatcher government's planned $15 billion Trident missile program.

A week into the campaign, the major unknown remained the role of the S.D.P. /Liberal Alliance. Although it has lost ground in the past year, its candidates struck out at both Foot and Thatcher in an attempt to carve out a middle ground between the two sharply polarized major parties. Campaigning last week in Glasgow, Jenkins and Liberal Party Leader David Steel held an innovative public question-and-answer session in Partick Burgh Hall. Steel, a tireless campaigner, views the snap election as a rare opportunity to boost his party's status with the electorate. Conservative campaign advisers have feared that the Alliance might do well enough to drain off Tory votes and deny Thatcher outright victory.

That is unlikely. The Prime Minister's austerity policies, and her determination not to compromise them even in the face of deep suffering in the work force, may be liabilities at the polls next month. But they pale in comparison with Foot's fail ure to control the left wing of his party and his unwillingness to step down in favor of the more popular and dynamic Healey. Wrote London Sunday Times Political Editor Hugo Young: "About Labor there is the stench of something close to death. The rot of self-doubt, even of self-ridicule, has set in." He added, "The vote will be negative as well as positive: anti-Foot as well as pro-Thatcher." For that matter, some of the vote will also be anti-Thatcher. The Prime Minister's bid for a second term may seem assured, but the surly, divisive campaign that precedes it will not make it all that easy for the winner to govern. --By Russ Hoyle. Reported by Bonnie Angela and Frank Melville/London

With reporting by Bonnie Angela, Frank Melville/London This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.