England and America: Transatlantic Echoes

...This, of course, is an important reason why the pollsters find that a general election in the near future would return the Tories triumphantly to power...

...British unemployment exceeds 13 per cent and is still rising...

...How quaint...

...It seems the cops opened a fake benefits center and lured into it some hundreds of applicants who may or may not have been entitled to welfare...

...Thatcher continues to ride high as the veritable Boadicea who led the Brits to a sound thrashing of the Argies...

...Nevertheless, an "informal" 4 per cent guideline has been set for permissible improvements in the pay of public employees...

...Random items in the British press remind this jaundiced American patriot that events march to similar tunes in both countries...

...Thatcher's troops responded that Callaghan had been so secretive about the movements of the Royal Navy that the Tory Opposition never found out about his maneuver...

...TV newscasts featured families boiling drinking water and dialysis patients threatened with denial of life-sustaining treatment...

...The more expensive the establishment, though, the better business seems to be...

...We can say for ourselves that Ronald Reagan would probably lose an election held this spring...

...Its clearest positions were derived from distaste for Labor's leftward drift...

...The authorities held these miscreants without bail, denied them legal representation and extracted a number of guilty pleas...

...His new and similar scheme has won the approval of a lower court...

...home foreclosures and business bankruptcies increase each month...

...Pundits speculate that the Iron Lady—a sobriquet Thatcher is said to relish—will call an election as early as May or June, although constitutionally she can wait almost 12 months longer...

...If you require amplification of the initials, you are not much of an Anglophile...

...The Prime Minister had equally good luck in the debate on a document issued by a commission of inquiry...

...and the pound keeps sinking to new lows...

...Oh yes, the operation cost approximately 30 times the amount fraudulently collected from the villains...

...When last I sojourned in London, not a single graffito adorned the trains...

...The Lord Lever of Manchester, failed to dissent from the following exculpatory conclusion: "There is no reasonable basis for any suggestion—which would be purely hypothetical—that the invasion would have been prevented if the Government had acted in the ways indicated in our report...

...Jenkins and Williams successfully fought by-elections in difficult constituencies...

...The Social Democrats, led by four former Labor heavyweights—Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen, and William Rodgers—are an occasion of even more gloom...

...In mid-February a one-year settlement was finally arrived at, and the workers came away winning 7.8 per cent...

...He claimed to have discreetly warned the military junta of the day that Naval reinforcements were on their way...

...Last time around the House of Lords law committee overruled him...

...Unfortunately, the Falklands only partly explain conservative popularity...

...still, the audience crowding around the bars during intermissions did not appear to have scraped their last pence out of cookie jars to finance musical pilgrimages...

...He reminded the House of Commons that the last time the Argies threatened to cut up rough was in 1977, when he was Prime Minister...

...As observers of collective bargaining know, "final" offers by employers are no more durable than " nonnegotiable" demands by unions...

...To stir the public pulse and distract patriotic minds from plant closings and overdue mortgage payments, there is nothing so effective as a short, successful war in a good cause at a comfortable distance from home...

...The triumph had everything—vindication of British arms against odds, clever ploys to deceive a slow-witted enemy, sturdy defense of the islanders' liberties, and even a role for Prince Andrew who, alas, had hastily to be withdrawn from public notice after he flew off for a weekend with a star of soft-pom flicks...

...Malcontents like me grumble about our own Democrats, divided between trendy Ataris betting on hi-tech solutions to stagnation and unemployment, and traditional liberals concentrated in Massachusetts and the persons of Tip O'Neill and Ted Kennedy...

...Fortnum and Mason does a brisk traffic in whole sides of Scotch salmon (Nova Scotia is just as good), jellied partridge, vintage wine, liqueur chocolates, and, strange item in such company, Campbell's soup...

...Merlyn Rees, MP, and the Rt...

...With proper pomp, it is entitled Falkland Islands Review, Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors, and was produced under the chairmanship of The Rt...

...The government may not be offering jobs for the unemployed, but it does want to improve them culturally...

...The registered unemployed can enter at half price...

...Then there was the strike by the workers who maintain water purification and sewage treatment facilities...

...Shirley Ver-rett and Jon Vickers could probably fill any auditorium, to be sure...

...A relatively short while ago, the common wisdom was that the latter figure spelled big trouble for a government that would easily countenance it...

...Each living ex-Prime Minister, including the two previous holders of the office, James Callaghan and Harold Wilson, nominated a commission member...

...For one thing, there are three opposition parties: Labor, the recently formed Social Democrats, and the Liberals...

...On each of several occasions that groups of government workers have challenged the guideline, it has been breached...

...Just like the good old days in California...

...The contrast between Republican and Conservative electoral prospects implies that Thatcher has been more successful than Reagan in lowering public expectations...

...Still another reason accounts for Ladbrookes' rating the Conservatives solid favorites...

...Not at all incidentally, let it be noted that in numerous emergencies the strikers put down their picket signs and rallied round to fix burst water mains and clogged filters...

...Our leaders in Washington must envy their British colleagues...

...Only a year ago, after the party linked arms with Liberals, the partnership appeared to have won enough general approval to be seriously considered a potential new government...

...By contrast, the Economists' Bookshop is empty...

...The Times of London—one of Rupert Murdoch's properties—editorially excoriated these rather badly paid laborers for their lack of public responsibility...

...The story has another side, as usual...

...The British are ingenious folks...

...For her part, the Prime Minister weighed in with an appeal to the Victorian work ethic—possibly with wages to match...

...As in the U.S., misery is regionally concentrated (in Scotland and the north of England, which routinely vote Labor in any election...

...At a magnificently sung Covent Garden performance of Samson and Delilah, for instance, the house was full at ticket prices as high as the Met's...

...Finally, little has been done to harmonize the two parties' cloudy manifestoes...

...The Falklands debate vied for media attention with the water story...

...The government, possibly recalling Reagan's triumph over the air controllers, began muttering about calling out the troops, who would be as proficient in running sewage plants as in mining coal...

...Yet several local authorities denied public housing to these families on the ground that they had become "voluntarily" homeless...

...Students of legislative archaeology will recall that the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act mandates 4 per cent unemployment for 1983...

...A closing word on the convergence of cultures...

...Pity our confreres in England, where the anti-Conservatives are in much worse shape...

...His Administration's new Economic Report defines full employment as 6.25 per cent unemployment...

...It costs a pound to see the special "Van Dyck in England" exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery...

...A fickle public was inclined to cry a plague on both major parties...

...Once the strike began, local authorities upped their offer to 7 per cent, a figure the union would almost surely have accepted a few months earlier...

...Labor, Her Majesty's official Loyal Opposition, has yet to resolve its long-running feud between the Michael Foot-Denis Healy-James Callaghan moderates and the Tony Benn left...

...They should have waited for the bailiffs to dislodge them...

...No wonder George Brockway in these pages is properly skeptical about economists, statisticians and their artifacts...

...The party took some months to fix on Roy Jenkins as its leader...

...Because Thatcher is vociferously attached to free market processes, the government has refrained from defining a general set of wage and price criteria...

...As in the land of the free, the gap between rich and poor widens...

...Therein lay considerable embarrassment for the Opposition, since the Labor nominees, the Rt...

...From the outset, moreover, there was rather more PR than substance in the Social Democrats' program...

...Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has had a year more than President Ronald Reagan to work the heavily advertised miracles of monetarism and supplyside incentives to the certifiably un-needy, and she has made good use of the time...

...I have every confidence London will soon narrow the cleanliness gap t hat currently separates the two subway systems...

...By now attitudes had hardened...

...It was belatedly revealed, for example, that last year the Oxford police mounted a sting operation suited to the taste of our President, that scourge of welfare cheaters...

...Last year gas and electricity workers, with whom water workers compare themselves, got something over 7 per cent...

...On another front, Red Ken, as the tabloids headline Kenneth Livingstone, the Leftist Chairman of the Greater London Council, has scored a possibly temporary victory in his attempt to reduce the city's very high bus and underground fares...

...The Lord Franks, OM, GCMG, KCB, CBE...

...As the head of a radical party, Jenkins' limitations are well-known...

...Labor voters, the omnipresent pollsters claim, disbelieve their party's promise to reduce unemployment from 3 to 1 million...

...Because pounds are cheap for Americans, restaurant and store prices are lower than they were three years ago...

...Thatcher could not have hoped for better...

...But as sober observers warned at the time, the alliance may have peaked too soon, a danger that haunted our own Richard Nixon...

...Otherwise little was new...

...The general verdict seemed to be that Thatcher had emerged without a scratch from two days of the reciprocal rudeness that constitutes debate in the mother of parliaments...

...In Britain, municipalities are obliged to supply housing for the homeless...

...This salutory action gave pause to the Argentines and averted war...

...Taking account of these considerations, and of all the evidence we have received, we conclude that we would not be justified in attaching any criticism or blame to the present Government for the Argentine Junta's decision to commit its act of unprovoked aggression in the invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982...

...They appreciate their new tax breaks and continue to support their benefactors...

...ENGLAND AND AMERICA Transatlantic Echoes BY ROBERT LEKACHMAN At the moment England and the United States are not so much two nations divided by a common language as a pair of societies gripped by administrations united in their devotion to social Darwinism...

...At the National Gallery Rubens' Samson and Delilah, a simply stunning painting, is the latest acquisition...

...The latest skirmish concerns the explusion of a Trotskyite group called Militant Tendency—because it has advocated extra-parliamentary action, whatever those ominous words might entail...

...Let me sound a more frivolous note...

...The buildings societies that provide most home mortgages induced a number of families, delinquent in monthly payments, to give up their homes...

...Not that Reagan has done badly in revision of American attitudes...

...This time around, local authorities under Whitehall pressure declared that 4 per cent was indeed their "final" offer...

...Iam constrained to confess that a cure for depression over the state of American politics is a spell in the old country...

...All the same, Callaghan did his best...

...In the interval, Magic Marker has crossed the Atlantic from New York...

...Even during its brief period of popularity, it was never clear exactly who was to be Prime Minister if the Alliance did actually form a new government, Jenkins or the attractive Liberal Party head David Steele...

...Again, just like home...

...As I viewed it, a quiet English voice behind me remarked approvingly, "It's very good, isn't it...

...The government has been as busy cutting student grants as benefits to other vulnerable groups...

...That is to say, numerous prosperous types on the other side of the Atlantic are also doing quite well, thank you...

...Although his social origins are working class, he speaks Oxbridge English, dresses like a senior civil servant, and possesses a keen palate for claret—not the drink of the masses...