TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/87/87capeng.1

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                                                                                June 22, 1987

BRITAIN

All Revved Up


Thatcher rides again, winning a chance to finish her
"revolution"


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 Partly
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
expresses 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,
ship- building 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:  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 charged 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, and 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.

--By David Brand.  Reported by Frank Melville/Leeds and
Christopher Ogden/London