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Across the land, unemployment has spawned some demonstrations; 50,000 workers turned out in bitter cold for a Labor "Day of Protest" on the gray and eerily lifeless docks of Liverpool. But there are as yet no serious signs that the social fabric cannot stretch with the strain. In the 1960s, British social scientists believed there would be riots in the streets if only a million people were out of work. Now workingmen sip their pint of lager in the pubs and union clubs and calmly discuss the bleak prospect of 3 million jobless. "People are bitter, but they're adapting so far," says Bruce George, a Labor M.P. from a constituency north of Birmingham where unemployment has doubled. "The one thing we haven't seen, thank God, is a major racial explosion. The easiest people to blame would be the immigrants."
At Johnson's Café, a wooden shack across the road from the main gate of British Leyland's Austin-Morris plant near Oxford, where workers can get a sausage, egg and chips lunch for 39 pence (92¢), everyone agrees that times are rough. But the young tend to disagree with the old about where the fault lies. One maintenance worker, who approves of Thatcher's economic policy, insists that "the trouble with this country is the unions have got too much power." An assembly-line worker who has been at the plant for 25 years, and remembers the depression, fumes: "We haven't got a government, not as far as the working class is concerned!" In Manchester, proud birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and once the most dynamic manufacturing center in the world, unemployment has doubled in a year, from 20,000 to an estimated 40,000. The city is ringed with plant after plant full of outdated machinery, operated by sharply curtailed work forces. Says Norman Morris, the leader of Manchester's city council: "Nearly all of our industry is suffering now. This area has tremendous potential, enormous expertise and a great desire to push across new frontiers. What's lacking is the capital."
At the labor exchange a few blocks from city hall, Frederick Holt, 64, emerges jubilant because he has just found a ten-day job as a census taker. Unemployed for a year, Holt is pessimistic. "All I can see is unemployment going up to 4 million by 1985. What's going to happen to this great country?" Another casualty of the crisis is William Sykes, 41, who was a skilled metalworker and shop steward for an engineering firm in Manchester that makes industrial gears. The plant was forced to lay off more than two-thirds of its work force in the past three months. Early in December, Sykes, who had been with the firm almost 27 years, got a letter saying he had been "selected for redundancy." Then, he recalls, "I got another letter next day saying, 'Finish up at four o'clock.' And that was it." He was handed a slip of paper as he left, noting his severance pay: a lump sum of $9,750 to tide him over until he became eligible for unemployment compensation in twelve weeks. Married with one child, he can then collect $82.37 a week. Trying to calculate how he will manage the mortgage payments, he shook his head morosely. "It's been a big jolt, what's