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With those stinging volleys, Britain's brief election season opened on a decidedly contentious note. The harsh rhetoric was hardly surprising. Thatcher's decision to cut short her five-year term and call elections for June 9 was calculated to take advantage of disarray within the Labor Party and exploit the image of Foot as an ineffectual leader. With the inflation rate hovering at 4%, down from a high of 22% in 1980, Thatcher gambled that British voters would not want to risk jeopardizing an economic recovery, or Britain's commitment to a strong nuclear defense, by electing a Labor government committed to what she considers the dangerously quixotic schemes of Labor's left wing. The Labor manifesto, written by the party's left over the opposition of moderates, calls for a huge jobs-creation program, a ban on nuclear weapons, and withdrawal from the European Community. Thatcher's bet seemed safe: last week's Market and Opinion Research International (MORI) poll showed the Tories with 46% of the vote, Labor with 37% and the Alliance with 16%. Thatcher's margin over Labor was down 6 percentage points from the previous week's MORI poll, but London bookmakers were still giving 7-to-l odds that the Prime Minister would be reelected.
Despite Thatcher's lead, the four-week campaign, coming at a time of record postwar unemployment of 13.6%, promises to be the most volatile and divisive in decades. Foot's reception in industrial centers such as Glasgow and Liverpool heartened Labor strategists. When he took aim at one of Thatcher's strongest electoral assets, the memory of her conduct of the Falklands war, by accusing her of "exploiting the deaths of young men who died in the Falklands," he drew thunderous applause. "Get her out, Michael!" shouted a young worker in Blackburn. Predicted Labor M.P. Eric Heffer: "This is going to be a dirty election."
In her opening press conference, Thatcher acknowledged that the high level of joblessness was her "most intractable" problem. She insisted that the "answer is not bogus social contracts and government overspending," but a resolve "to keep inflation down and offer real incentive for private enterprise." According to most public opinion polls, voters blame unemployment more on the worldwide recesssion than on the Thatcher government's fiscal policies.
The Prime Minister also renewed her pledge to control inflation, cut income taxes and maintain Britain's membership in the European Community. Any attempt to pull out of the Community, she said, would "put at risk millions of jobs." Thatcher promised to denationalize such major government-owned companies as British Airways, Rolls-Royce and British Telecom. She made it equally plain that a new Thatcher government would stand by its commitment to improve Britain's nuclear deter rent by buying U.S.-built, submarine-launched Trident missiles and would continue to support the planned deployment of U.S. cruise missiles at the British bases at Greenham Common and Molesworth.