The gloves come off as Campaign '83 starts fast and ugly
As the rolling, majestic cadences of Rule Britannia sounded in London's packed Conservative Party headquarters, a confident Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 57, strode to the podium to fire the first official salvo in Britain's surprise 1983 election campaign. Flanked by Cabinet ministers, beneath a bright blue banner proclaiming the new Tory slogan BRITAIN STRONG AND FREE, Thatcher lost no time — and squandered no politesse—in proclaiming her determination to "ensure that Britain remains a steadfast ally in an uncertain world." She unveiled a manifesto that would further toughen Tory policies on trade unionism, denationalization of state-run industries and big-city metropolitan councils. In so doing, Thatcher drew the battle lines with the opposition Labor Party in the bleakest terms. "The choice before the nation is stark," she intoned, "either to continue our present progress toward recovery or to follow policies more extreme and more damaging than those ever put forward by any previous opposition."
While the Tory campaign machinery hummed into action, opposition candidates took to the hustings to mount fiery attacks of their own. Before a half-filled house at Glasgow's cavernous Apollo Theater, Labor Party Leader Michael Foot, 69, lashed out at the Prime Minister's economic policies. "Thatcherism is the most appalling economic mess in generations!" he shouted. "The industrial destruction she has inflicted upon this country is even worse than Hitler's bombings." Campaigning in the economically depressed West Midlands, Deputy Labor Party Leader Denis Healey discovered a mechanical crab at a street market and held it up before TV cameras. "It moves sideways and evades your every instruction," he joked. "I'm going to call it Sir Geoffrey Howe." That swipe at Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer made the evening news programs. Said Healey: "Margaret Thatcher has turned the Tory Party into her personal dictatorship."
Even Social Democratic Party Leader Roy Jenkins, who would become Prime Minister in the unlikely event of a victory by the centrist S.D.P./Liberal Alliance, dropped his usually temperate mien to blast Thatcher. Jenkins acidly compared her new Tory manifesto to Field Marshal Douglas Haig's message after the disastrous Battle of the Somme in 1916: "Ground gained negligible, casualties intolerable, but press on."