TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/87/87capeng.1

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                ╖¥â(╟■                                                ╢««All Revved Up

June 22, 1987

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