Word: heaths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Coatless in a raw February wind, the Prime Minister hoisted himself onto the back of a green Land Rover in the courtyard of the North Ealing Conservative Club. The wind had long since whipped the hand-lettered WELCOME TED HEATH sign from the club's red-tiled roof, but his audience of 150 constituency workers loyally shivered through Heath's homiletic. Winding up the set-piece campaign talk, he proclaimed that thanks to the oil that will be gushing from the North Sea before the end of the decade, "we are going to be one of the fortunate...
That was about the only good news that Heath could offer British voters as he took his bid for a new five-year mandate down to the wire. Amid a nationwide coal miners' strike and a government-ordered three-day work week, Britain goes to the polls this week to elect a new Parliament in its ninth general election since World War II. As the campaign headed into its third and final week, new issues tumbled into the headlines almost as fast as the candidates could cope with them...
First, the government reported that food prices climbed 20% last year-the biggest increase ever recorded-for an overall rise of 53% since the Tory Party led by Prime Minister Heath came to power in 1970. Then the government Pay Board announced that a major error had been made in computing miners' wages in comparison with those of other industrial workers. The National Coal Board, it explained, had included the miners' three weeks of vacation pay in assessing their pay levels, while pay figures for other industries, calculated by the Department of Trade and Industry, excluded holiday...
Safe Guess. The extraordinary disclosure suggested that the miners' slowdown, the three-day week, the strike and even the election all might have been averted, since it lent strong justification to the miners' main argument that they had fallen behind other workers in pay. On election eve Heath is expected to get more bad news when the January trade figures are released. The Labor Party's shadow Chancellor, Denis Healey, has predicted that they will be "hair-raising"-a fairly safe guess...
...trade unions allowed the government to carry out its "lame duck" policy, by which Heath decided not to support industries in debt no matter how important they were to an industrial region, the gap would now be a yawning chasm. As it was, the trade union activists--so hated by Heath--managed to keep some industries open by the strength of their protests. In spite of this success, the unions have had a terribly difficult time with a government that sees labor as fulfilling a profit function rather than a social function...