Britain All Revved Up

By David Brand

Stylishly dressed, hair perfectly coiffed and wearing the inevitable pearl earrings, Margaret Thatcher had dropped by for yet another of British election organizers' much loved photo opportunities. This time it was a famous motorcycle manufacturer in Newton Abbot, Devonshire. The Prime Minister, ever the lady, would not be pushed into providing a spectacle for the press. "I think that would be a bit gimmicky, don't you?" she declared, politely declining requests to sit on a motorcycle or even grip the handlebars. But Thatcher is not one to miss such an opportunity entirely, and almost coyly she allowed her fingers to trace the name on the machine as photographers snapped away. It read TRIUMPH.

The prophecy proved accurate. Last week Thatcher's Tory Party was resoundingly returned to office, although with a reduced majority. She thus became the first Prime Minister in modern British political history to win three successive general elections. The country's 43.7 million voters, who regard her iron-willed leadership with a mixture of admiration and anxiety, gave the Conservatives a 101-seat majority in the 650-member House of Commons, 43 fewer than the party had won in the 1983 elections. But that was more than sufficient for Thatcher to pursue her "unfinished revolution" in reshaping the political, economic and social fabric of Britain. When she was first elected in 1979, the country was in such economic peril that only 2 1/2 years earlier it had sought a bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund. Today Britain is a leading creditor nation with a vibrant economy, a rising currency and a booming stock market that soared anew in response to the Tory victory. Thatcher, says London's Sunday Times, has brought about Britain's "biggest transformation since the Industrial Revolution."

Under Neil Kinnock, 45, a balding, red-haired Welshman, the ever squabbling Labor Party managed to increase its seats in the House to 229 from the 209 it won in 1983, though last week's showing was still the party's second worst in more than a half-century. The most disappointed loser was the Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance, which had become a third force in British politics in its six years of existence. Led by the Liberals' David Steel and the Social Democrats' David Owen, the Alliance had aimed to eclipse Labor as the main opposition party. Instead, its representation in the House was reduced to 22 seats from the 23 it won in the previous election. The vote was a landmark in one respect: three blacks and an Indian, all Labor candidates, became the first nonwhites elected to the House of Commons since 1922.

On Saturday, Thatcher named a new 21-member Cabinet. Most were holdovers, but there were two surprises. Norman Tebbit, the Conservative Party chairman who had just led the Tories to victory, resigned as Minister Without Portfolio. Though no reason was given, he reportedly wanted to spend more time with his wife, who was badly injured during a 1984 bombing attack by the Irish Republican Army. Cecil Parkinson, who resigned in 1983 in the midst of a sex scandal (he had fathered his secretary's child), rejoined the Cabinet as Energy Secretary.

For Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 61, the daughter of a grocer from the Lincolnshire town of Grantham, the hefty Tory majority could help her attain the prime goal for her third term, to "destroy socialism," which has been a decisive force in British life since the end of World War II. The election results will also enable her to continue with the economic policy that is now known as Thatcherism. Since she came to power in 1979, her policy of cutting back on inefficient industries and attacking inflation with tight money and reduced government spending has greatly expanded the middle class and transformed Britain from the sick man of Europe to the fastest-growing economic power in the European Community. "We have put the Great back into Britain," she repeatedly declared during the campaign. Last May, shortly after she called the elections 13 months before the end of her five-year term, she insisted, "Our country has changed for the better. We have discovered a new strength and a new pride."

Many Britons see a different country, where the gap between the well-off of the green, leafy south and the struggling workers of much of the gritty, industrial north has widened under Thatcher. Indeed, the election results confirmed this divide, with support for Labor up 7% in the north and the Tories' vote rising 25% in the south. That schism led in large measure to the Tories' reduced representation in Parliament. Unemployment has increased threefold over the past eight years. A record 3 million Britons are without jobs today, although the figures have been declining for the past nine months. The health service and the educational system are in chaos. Said the Sunday Observer: "We are fast moving -- in crucial areas like health and education -- toward private affluence and public squalor."

Thatcher had the good fortune to face as her main opposition a Labor Party still scarred by dissension. A majority of voters rejected its policies of increased public spending and unilateral nuclear disarmament. The party was committed to abandoning the British nuclear deterrent and seeking the removal of all U.S. cruise missiles and other nuclear weapons from British soil. Many Britons, including some Labor supporters, believe that policy would leave the country at the mercy of the Soviets. Kinnock seemed to admit as much when he told Television Interviewer David Frost that a nonnuclear Britain's best defense against the Soviets would be to use "all the resources you have got to make any ((Soviet)) occupation totally untenable." Within hours, Thatcher was accusing Kinnock of hoisting "the white flag of surrender." Later she told a rally, "I'm a mum, and I like to think that those who believe in keeping Britain strong, free and properly defended belong in mum's army."

After the election, the Alliance's Owen joined in the criticism of Labor's policies. "They were unelectable and are unelectable," he declared. "The reason Labor has not delivered is that their policies stink." Owen, however, was having his own problems. The Alliance had counted on this election to gain a surge of new support from middle-of-the-road voters, but its share of the popular vote actually declined nearly 3 percentage points from 1983, putting its survival in doubt. Analysts believe the Alliance suffered because there were fewer uncommitted voters in this election. The two Alliance parties may also have lost support through their public disagreements over Britain's nuclear policy.

The campaign was an ill-tempered four-week ordeal, with Labor's main hatchet man, Shadow Foreign Secretary Denis Healey, variously comparing the Prime Minister to Catherine the Great and Genghis Khan. The electorate looked on in apparent bemusement at a campaign that rarely sent the national pulse racing and was, American-style, fought out largely on television. In another imitation of U.S. campaigning, both major parties relied on photo opportunities, carefully choreographed meetings with voters, and ticket- holders-only rallies of the faithful.

Election analysts agreed that Labor had ensured its survival as one of Britain's two major parties by mounting a superior campaign. Party strategists focused their effort on the personable Kinnock and his wife Glenys. Cannily avoiding the largely Tory, London-based press, the couple spent long periods campaigning in the provinces, far from London. "The style was vintage Jimmy Carter," noted a Western ambassador in London. Thatcher, by contrast, made the usual one-day campaign forays from the capital. "The Kinnocks were packaged with professionalism and flair," conceded a Conservative politician, "while most of the time we seemed to lack both." Thatcher occasionally stumbled, as when she was asked why she had taken out private medical insurance rather than relying on the National Health Service. She replied, "To enable me to go into hospital on the day I want, at the time I want, with the doctor I want." That led Owen to castigate her for indifference toward those who cannot afford the luxury of choosing between private and state health care.

Less than 65 hours before the polls opened, Thatcher flew by private jet to the seven-nation Venice summit, where the televised image of her moving easily among major world leaders was not lost on voters. At his last campaign rally, Kinnock mocked the Venice trip before a crowd in the bleak northern city of Leeds. Said he: "And now the TV spectacular to end all TV spectaculars: Venice. Cinderella on canal. She went there because somebody told her she could walk down the middle of the street."

That final, cocky gesture was typical of Kinnock, who entered the campaign with a reputation as a political lightweight. In just over 3 1/2 years as Labor's leader he had rarely bested Thatcher in their almost weekly jousts during the Prime Minister's question time in the House of Commons, and he had been ridiculed for his often rambling and emotional speeches. He was criticized by radical leftists in the Labor Party for moving it too far toward the center. But his eloquent campaign attacks against Tory parsimony won him respect as a warm, compassionate leader. In one crowd-pleasing piece of oratory last week, he evoked the meter of Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas when he declared there were just four more days left of "hope-destroying, unemploying, care-cutting, factory-shutting, nation-splitting, poor-hitting, truth-mangling, freedom-strangling Toryism."

Perhaps the major issue in the campaign was Thatcher's dream of a more prosperous, more assertive Britain in contrast to Labor's view of a country in crisis. It was Labor, however, that had presided over many of the country's frequent economic crises in the 1960s and '70s. By the time Thatcher arrived in 1979, Britain was saddled with a costly welfare state in which labor- management relations were mired in class conflict and industry was aging and inefficient. Since then, Thatcher has transformed Britain more dramatically than any Prime Minister since Clement Attlee, who presided over the creation of the welfare state in the late 1940s. Her third term is likely to be an extension of the Thatcher revolution. Since Britain began pulling out of the recession in 1981, the economy has grown at an annual rate of around 3%, and annual productivity is growing 3.5%, not far behind Japan's 4%. Inflation is down to 3.5% from a high of 24.2% in 1975. Many Britons have prospered under Thatcher. Partly because of government efforts to encourage the creation of new companies in the services area, 1 million people have jobs that did not exist before Thatcher came to office. In fact, in 1979 only 30% of the British were considered middle class; now nearly half the country fits that description. And through incentives to small business, Thatcher has opened doors to entrepreneurs. For all that, some of Thatcher's countrymen clearly prefer the older Britain, slower paced, caring and imbued with a frayed gentility. Even some Conservatives have expressed concern that Thatcher has seemed callous toward the poor and the disadvantaged. For her part, the Prime Minister argues that she has turned a "lame-duck economy into a bulldog economy." Only vigorous growth, she insists, can support the level of social services Britons demand. The election, she said recently, was not a "choice between a caring party and an uncaring one. All decent people care about the sick, the unfortunate and the old. It is false and wicked to suggest otherwise."

Still, Thatcher's major challenge in her third term will be the problems of poverty and joblessness. While new employment is up, some 2 million jobs have disappeared, mostly in coal mining, shipbuilding and other declining industries that Britain, like other Western countries, has been weaning away from government subsidies in order to force greater efficiency. Inequality has persisted, with half the British population now holding 93% of the country's wealth, down only marginally from 95% in 1979. Says Peter Townsend, professor of social policy at the University of Bristol: "Eight years of Thatcherism have resulted in a widening gap between rich and poor."

To help narrow this gap, Thatcher has proposed a job-training scheme for all secondary-school dropouts and, within five years, job training for all those under 50 who have been unemployed for two years. Actually finding jobs for these trainees, however, may be difficult. In a March poll, a majority of voters questioned said they would forgo the tax cuts delivered this year by the government if the savings were used to improve unemployment, health and education. Yet Thatcher is opposed to large increases in public spending for social programs and job creation. Her fear is that inflation will break loose again. The Tories prefer restraint, with government spending rising only 1 1/ % 4% a year through 1991, a figure that could increase as the economy improves.

One spread-the-wealth measure that Thatcher is expected to pursue vigorously is her program of "people's capitalism," under which state-owned companies are being sold to the public. Since 1979 more than one-third of Britain's nationalized industries have gone public -- including British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways and Rolls-Royce -- bringing in more than $29 billion for the treasury. What Napoleon called a "nation of shopkeepers" has changed under Thatcher into a nation of shareholders. Nearly 20% of adult Britons own stock nowadays, triple the number in 1979. Next in line for sale: the British Airports Authority, regional water boards and the electricity industry.

The Prime Minister will also encourage the sale of subsidized, local council-owned houses and apartments to their tenants, a program she began in her first term. Since then, the number of owner-occupied homes has risen from 50% to 66%. Her goal for the third term is 75%.

Thatcher's concern for the emerging middle class contrasts with her distaste for organized labor. In the three decades before she took over, wildcat strikes had torn holes in the country's economy. Major trade unions were considered more powerful than the government, and labor unrest helped topple two Prime Ministers, Edward Heath in 1974 and James Callaghan in 1979. Thatcher changed all that. Starting in 1980 she pushed through legislation to limit picketing rights, ban secondary picketing and make national unions financially responsible for the actions of their members. She has taken on a number of the country's most powerful unions and crushed them: the steelworkers in 1980, the coal miners in 1985 after a bitter one-year strike, and the teachers last year. Partly as a result of Thatcher's efforts, union membership has fallen by one-quarter, to 9 million, and strikes are at a 50- year low. The number of workdays lost to labor disputes has declined from 29.5 million in 1979 to a mere 1.9 million last year. In her third term Thatcher plans legislation to further curb the power of the unions.

The country's education system has slipped badly under Thatcher. Critics charge that spending has been cut 10% after inflation, and even her Minister for Information Technology, Geoffrey Pattie, complains that "schools are turning out dangerously high quotas of illiterate, delinquent unemployables." One Tory proposal is to take control of secondary and primary schools away from local councils, many of them Labor dominated, and give principals and school boards more power over their budgets.

Britain's National Health Service also has deteriorated. With a staff of 1 million, the NHS will spend $33 billion this year, but its patient waiting lists are the longest in the European Community. As many as 700,000 people are waiting for surgery, some of them have been for years. Budget cuts have closed 20 hospitals in the London area alone. The government points out, however, that spending on the health service has actually increased 2 1/2 times in the past eight years. The government has already set aside $83 million for a two- year program to treat more than 100,000 patients waiting for operations.

Under Thatcher the country has asserted itself more on the world stage than at any other time since the 1956 loss of the Suez Canal, an event widely regarded as the end of Britain's days as a major world power. She presided over the 1982 victory against Argentina in the Falklands war, and despite domestic opposition, pressed ahead with the modernization of Britain's aging Polaris nuclear submarine fleet, accepted U.S. cruise missiles on British soil and last year allowed U.S. F-111s to strike Libya from British air bases. Her visit to Moscow in April, during which she spent 13 hours in private with Mikhail Gorbachev, cemented her position as a world figure. British cartoonists have even taken to portraying her with a Churchillian cigar. She plans to visit Reagan in July, and it is likely that once again the discussion will center on negotiations for an intermediate-range nuclear forces agreement with the Soviets.

Over the past eight years the British have learned to take seriously something Thatcher says about herself: "If you want someone weak, you don't want me." Indeed, she is often compared to a hectoring nanny. Although some voters hope her newly won third term will be her last hurrah, she insists that "I have no wish to retire for a very long time. I am still bursting with energy."

The Prime Minister typically rises at 6, after only five hours' sleep, and breakfasts on black coffee and vitamin pills. She often fixes simple meals for herself and Husband Denis, 72, a retired businessman and avid golfer. Thatcher's own favorite recreation appears to be reading briefing papers. She has groomed no obvious successor among the Tories, and remarked early in the campaign that she might "go on and on," perhaps seeking a fourth term. "What would she do if she weren't Prime Minister?" asks Tory Chairman Tebbit. "One doesn't see her retiring to gardening or making marmalade." One does not.

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