Britain at War with Itself

...Even Mick McGahey, the Communist leader of the Scottish miners and one of the most intransigent of the union leaders, needed police protection once irrefutable signs of the strike's crumbling moved him to concede that continuing it would be futile...

...But he rejects the glaring lack of compassion accompanying their implementation, which is also characteristic of the government's drive to dismantle the welfare state little by little...

...Scargill is living up to his vow to continue industrial guerrilla warfare after the return to work...

...Consequently, she has made this a major priority, pressing hard on three fronts: modernizing key industries...

...they see her stubbornness as sheer maliciousness...

...In the light of its continuing suicidal tendencies, though, Labor is unlikely to present much of a challenge in the elections expected in two years...

...She knows, too, that the country's industrial stagnation, and in a few important areas decline, are the cause of its economic malaise and growing social antagonisms...

...Thatcher, trying unconvincingly not to gloat, believes she has finally taught the unions a lesson...

...The many months of the stoppage hurt the Laborites dearly...

...According to a recent public opinion poll, 67 per cent of Britons think that under Thatcher their country is more divided—between rich and poor, the employed and the jobless, northerners and southerners—than it had been...

...Ideologically motivated physical violence has become common here...

...It will also take a long time to repair the geological damage the pits suffered during the walkout, and longer still to attain desired production levels...

...Actually, it is calculated and very carefully directed...

...and creating new, competitive high-tech firms...

...Although Neil Kinnock cannot admit it publicly without widening the already gaping cleavages inside his party, he accepts many of Thatcher s industrial objectives...

...If anything, it appears that a protest vote against Thatcherism could strengthen the third political force, the Social Democratic-Liberal Alliance...

...She modulates her voice and often says the right things, yet her words seem rehearsed...

...And not only invective is flying through the air...

...Its previous appearance marked the famous " winter of discontent" that ultimately drove Labor Prime Minister James Callaghan out of office...

...It will be a long time before Labor can stop making excuses for his fruitless and damaging syndicalism...

...Having fought only one general election so far, the Alliance still blows an uncertain trumpet—but it has a stronger commitment than its rival on the Left to the development of a solidly based British economy, and it is more sensitive than the Tories to Britain's social problems...

...The row over the budget deficit, the anger of the downtrodden farmers, the Nicaragua controversy— they all seem part of Washington's orderly give-and-take process, at least measured against the turbulence and venom that now characterize Britain's political scene...

...Her advisers caution that failure to reverse the situation could produce an ugly explosion...

...What is impossible to imagine is Mrs T sharing power with anyone...

...Nor has the party's ordeal ended with the conclusion of the coal strike in early March...

...That was strong talk for the country's two senior partisan figures, yet tame compared with some of the invective being traded of late...

...The Prime Minister tries to sound caring...

...Additional battles are in the pipeline, too...

...Rarely these days can Thatcher make an announced appearance in a public place without facing a barrage of eggs and abuse hurled by Left-wing activists who say she is destroying the nation...

...When the miners walked out, the party was just beginning to regain its balance following the overwhelming victory of the Tories in the June 1983 elections...

...In fact, in a country where at least half the population receives some sort of welfare check (if merely because they have small children), where NHS cutbacks mean longer waits for operations, where inadequate state pensions forced the elderly to reduce their utility usage and suffer from the cold during the past savage winter, the image of Thatcher Victorious has been badly tarnished...

...But the Prime Minister is not the only unyielding person inhabiting these fair isles...

...To anyone tracking the British scene over the last several years, the pattern is terribly familiar—a rash of strikes, declarations that pay demands are beyond the means of the employers, warnings of doing harm to the British economy and civilized way of life...

...Neither, indeed, can Kinnock or Norman Willis, the newly named head of the Trades Union Congress, escape their jibes and rotten tomatoes: Both men, hoping to avert the clearly looming prospect that Thatcher would defeat the National Union of Miners (NUM) outright, incurred the militants' wrath as they vainly tried to achieve a negotiated settlement to the year-long coed dispute...

...More recently, Labor might well have made political capital out of the pound's sharp decline in value vis-a-vis the rampaging dollar, particularly given the TV Norman Gelb, the NL's London correspondent, is the author most recently of Less Than Glory: A Revisionist's View of the American Revolution...

...Verbal abuse is unrestrained and heartfelt...

...the country is full of stubborn men and women...

...In addition, the Conservative lead in voting preference polls has become less stable, allowing Labor to slip marginally ahead on occasion...

...These included mob attacks on working miners, the terroriza-tion of their families, sabotage of the nationalized coal industry's expensive equipment, and the obstruction of efforts to save several underground mine faces in danger of destruction by tunnel collapse...

...It was sad to hear normally articulate Labor spokesmen in the House of Commons, who genuinely felt the strikers had real grievances, stutter through explanations of how their disapproval of violence did not prevent them from understanding the frustrations that drove men to commit it...

...No one, though, could excuse the murder of a Welsh taxi driver killed by a concrete block dropped from an overpass while he was ferrying two terrified working miners to their pit...

...Today, however, there is an important difference: Callaghan's successor, the indomitable Iron Lady herself...

...The teachers' unions have already started a campaign of selective stoppages...

...She is aware that Britain has fallen way behind the rest of the developed world— not simply the United States, Japan and Germany, but France and Italy as well...

...For if the party of the working man could not fail to support one of the biggest and oldest unions in the country, it could not easily sanction the Scargillites' tactics either...

...discarding unprofitable ones, no matter how great the immediate impact on the people they employ or the communities dependent upon them...

...A short while ago, Margaret Thatcher called striking coal miners "the enemy within...

...To be sure, the Opposition had not at that point shown visible signs of recovery, but it was about to launch a carefully prepared, sustained assault on the government for Britain's horrendous 13 per cent-plus unemployment, glaring cuts in National Health Service (NHS) facilities, and heavy military expenditures —traditionally vote-winning issues...

...Some of Margaret Thatcher's political opponents charge that she really does not have any coherent policy...

...The impression persists, therefore, that as long as she has her way, she doesn't care about the price anyone else must pay...

...Quite a few people who have voted to put and keep her in office since 1979 are at present troubled and apprehensive...

...newscast kickers showing happy-as-a-lark Americans buying out Harrods and the newspaper features unmasking dollar-rich Yanks buying up British real estate...

...Thus at this early stage anyway, a Tory-Alliance coalition the next time around does not seem beyond the realm of possibility...

...Sixty-three per cent said they believed riots and civil disturbances would be more common in the future...

...Instead, saddled with backing an unpopular strike that NUM President Arthur Scargill would not put to a vote of his members, and that tens of thousands of miners threatened with banishment from the fraternity forever nonetheless refused to join, Kinnock and his colleagues were forced on the defensive...

...Some of them may certainly be reluctant to tangle with her in view of the beating she handed thesu-premely confident Scargill and her success in seriously dividing his organization...

...Despite the miners' savage setback, the railway employees are moving ahead with their plans for an " industrial action" aimed at gaining a substantial pay raise the management of the nationalized lines says it cannot begin to afford...

...In reply, Labor Party chief Neil Kinnock accused the Conservative Prime Minister of declaring war on a great many of her fellow-citizens...