Word: labourers
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Margaret Thatcher's achievement in becoming Britain's first woman Prime Minister is writ large with irony. Thursday's general election brought no cheer to feminists: Britain's only avowed lesbian MP lost her seat, as did Labour's most important woman politician, popular cabinet minister Shirley Williams. The new House of Commons contains the smallest contingent of women since 1950. As for Mrs. Thatcher herself, some regard her views on the role of women in society as being just about on a par with the Ayatollah Khomeini...
...curbs on the power of unions. In the industrial North, where many people fear what 'market economy'-style politics may mean for jobs and social services, the drift to the Conservatives was much more negligible. And in Scotland, where the nationalist challenge collapsed, there was actually a swing to Labour--with Teddy Taylor, the Conservative spokesman on Scotland, losing his seat. The scathing portrayal of Mrs. Thatcher by one Northern critic as the "Right Honourable Member for Complacent Southern Suburbia" underlines the festering hostility that she will face from the folks north of the river Trent...
Thatcher won because she and her party--like the New Right in the U.S.--managed to shift the consensus from the middle of the road. A revealing poll on issues in the British newspaper Observer showed a majority (and even a majority of Labour supporters) favouring Tory proposals on tax cuts, on getting tougher with the unions and strikers, and on reducing government involvement in the economy. Labour might have staked out a clear alternative to this on the Left with proposals for industrial democracy, more public ownership, and social service and welfare reform--all elements that have traditionally given...
When the patience of many workers, dismayed at having traded three years of wage restraint for the sterility of the Callaghan program, erupted into the disastrous strikes this past winter, the one fig-leaf covering the Labour government--their claim to be able to 'manage' the unions--had disappeared. There was little left to fight for, and long before election day, the Labour faithful were demoralized by the party's failure to present a radical alternative to the Tory challenge...
...frosty response from the Thatcher administration. Gone will be the cosy rapport Carter shared with Jim Callaghan, who was very much an Atlanticist and who was even accused at times of being slavishly indulgent to U.S. interests. Gone too will be the close relationship with David Owen, Labour's outgoing Foreign Secretary, and his friend the British Ambassador to Washington, Peter Jay, who as Callaghan's son-in-law can expect his replacement to be one of the first acts of the Conservative government...