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Thatcher aimed her sharpest thrusts at the heart of the Labor Party, the trade unions. She pledged to "bring democracy to the shop-floor workers" by introducing legislation that would require union leaders to stand for re-election every five years and call strikes only by secret ballot. The proposals represent a direct challenge to entrenched left-wing leaders who have dominated the labor movement recently.
At each stop last week, Foot and other Labor officials hammered away at their only potent issue: the Thatcher record on unemployment. The party's first ten-minute televised campaign message effectively focused on the plight of young jobless workers. The centerpiece of the Labor campaign is a five-year crash program to create 2.5 million new jobs, mainly by diverting some $17 billion now spent on unemployment benefits and tax-revenue losses. Other savings, according to the Labor platform, would come from scrapping the Thatcher government's planned $15 billion Trident missile program.
A week into the campaign, the major unknown remained the role of the S.D.P. /Liberal Alliance. Although it has lost ground in the past year, its candidates struck out at both Foot and Thatcher in an attempt to carve out a middle ground between the two sharply polarized major parties. Campaigning last week in Glasgow, Jenkins and Liberal Party Leader David Steel held an innovative public question-and-answer session in Partick Burgh Hall. Steel, a tireless campaigner, views the snap election as a rare opportunity to boost his party's status with the electorate. Conservative campaign advisers have feared that the Alliance might do well enough to drain off Tory votes and deny Thatcher outright victory.
That is unlikely. The Prime Minister's austerity policies, and her determination not to compromise them even in the face of deep suffering in the work force, may be liabilities at the polls next month. But they pale in comparison with Foot's fail ure to control the left wing of his party and his unwillingness to step down in favor of the more popular and dynamic Healey. Wrote London Sunday Times Political Editor Hugo Young: "About Labor there is the stench of something close to death. The rot of self-doubt, even of self-ridicule, has set in." He added, "The vote will be negative as well as positive: anti-Foot as well as pro-Thatcher." For that matter, some of the vote will also be anti-Thatcher. The Prime Minister's bid for a second term may seem assured, but the surly, divisive campaign that precedes it will not make it all that easy for the winner to govern. —By Russ Hoyle. Reported by Bonnie Angela and Frank Melville/London