Heading Toward Lollipop Land

As Britain headed into the homestretch of the second electoral campaign this year, the mood of the country and the sharply contrasting styles of its two major parties could not have been more clearly drawn. Offered a choice of Laborite Harold Wilson's balm or Tory Ted Heath's gloom, the voters seemed to be opting for the former.

At week's end, the polls showed Labor leading the Conservatives by margins ranging from 7 1/2% to 9%. Of course the pollsters could be wrong, as they were in the last two elections. Even so, both the Tories and the Liberals, who have been warning of dire economic disruptions, had begun to get the message: British voters are not interested in any more bad news. One Liberal leader remarked acidly last week, "If the people want to drift off again into lollipop land, then we have some real problems."

The British economic crisis has not gone away, but Britons unmistakably have grown weary of crisis talk. Despite prophecies of disaster round the corner, they have continued to find jobs, and pay packets by and large have kept up with prices. The present economic climate, with inflation approaching 20%, is more serious than anything the country has faced since the 1930s. But it still seems to be something better understood by economists and merchant bankers than by the man in the street. As Jimmy Buchanan, a Scottish shipyard worker observes: "Aye, you can read about it, but you can't feel it much, can you?"

British election campaigns are mercifully short, and this one lasted no more than the minimum three weeks. Even so, one Liberal Party worker admitted that "there is a real problem that we could alienate voters by overcanvassing the way we did last time." Clement Freud, the talk-show wit and Liberal MR, forgivingly told a small audience in his rural constituency: "I know there are many other attractions in Tydd St. Giles." Summed up Guardian Columnist Adam Raphael: "The election shows disturbing signs of going to sleep."

If there was a lollipop syndrome, its chief beneficiary last week appeared to be Harold Wilson, who would like to gain his fourth victory as Labor Party leader and thus become the winningest Prime Minister of this century. Slimmer, tanned and far more confident than during his lackluster February campaign, Wilson, 58, this time carefully husbanded his energy; he seldom made more than one or two appearances a night, and then only to packed gatherings of the party faithful.

Tory Plot. His set piece was a mixture of soothing assurances that no one need fear the future under Labor, and mocking, biblically salted sarcasm directed at the Conservatives. If things were not going to get substantially better overnight, he would say, neither were they going to grow much worse. Talk of economic crisis was mostly a Tory plot. Said he before a suburban audience last week: "What the people want, what every family needs, is a bit of peace and quiet so that they can plan for the future on a basis of real security for the whole family." Repeatedly, he drew the loudest cheers when he told his audience that prosperity would return to Britain on the incoming tides of North Sea oil, which Energy Minister Eric Varley has appraised at $250 billion.

By contrast, Ted Heath's campaign was both somber and low-keyed. The Tory election strategy was designed to present Heath as a relaxed, confident candidate, instead of the uptight finger wagger who brought on the debacle of the three-day work week in a losing confrontation with the unions last winter. Initially, Heath was maintaining such an excessively low profile that Wilson sarcastically declared that he would ask for a court order to force the Tories to produce their candidate.

Heath's campaign was bedeviled by poor planning and tactical errors. In one grueling 15-hour day last week in Scotland, where the Tories trailed behind both Labor and the Nationalists, his two-bus procession went through the countryside from Glasgow to Edinburgh and back as silently, gloomily and unnoticed as some sort of lost caravan. When Heath did stop to address depressingly small crowds, his hecklers came close to outnumbering his supporters. In the small market town of Haddington, for instance, Nationalists drowned out his message by playing "It's Scotland's Oil" over the loudspeakers. Inexplicably, his only campaign stops in Edinburgh were at a 23-patient home for deaf-mutes and a Catholic home for the aged.

Heath last week virtually admitted that the Tories had little chance of ruling the country by themselves and promised to bring members of the other parties into his Cabinet should he win. His best bet would be a coalition with the

Liberals, but even that appeared problematical, since there was no evidence that Jeremy Thorpe's vigorous but small third party could measurably increase the 14 seats it won last time.

At week's end London bookmakers were offering heavy odds (1-3) in favor of a Labor victory, but many experts continued to hedge their bets. For one thing, a large number of voters (25% in one poll) declared themselves undecided. For another, there was a fear that Wilson's soothing campaign may have so successfully tranquilized the public that they might not even bother to vote.

That could seriously hurt Labor. In oth er quarters, though, the betting was that Britons would indeed turn out en masse on Oct. 10 -- if only to make sure that they do not have to go through another such uninspiring election campaign again soon.

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