A Long Summer of Discontent

By James Kelly

Sound, fury and rotting fruit signify trouble for Thatcher

In the end, the strike was settled not by artful negotiation but by an eruption of hot-tempered fury. As the walkout by Britain's 17,700 dock workers dragged into its second week, the truck drivers stuck at the port of Dover grew surlier. By late last week the motorway snaking through the tranquil Kent countryside had burgeoned into a five-mile parking lot, replete with the bellow of air horns and the whiff of rotting fruit destined never to reach its market. The curses grew saltier, the threats louder. Finally, an ultimatum came from the madding crowd: open the port by 10 p.m. or else. An hour before the deadline, scared dock strikers relented and waved the vehicles by. Seven hours later, union officials and port operators emerged from a 16-hour bargaining session in London to announce a settlement.

So ended the most disruptive labor crisis since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. The ten-day strike not only shut down freight operations at more than 90 ports but badly crimped the island nation's maritime exports, worth an estimated $2.5 billion a week. There was also a political cost: the strike by longshoremen, called dockers by the British, came to symbolize a summer of discontent for the 58-year-old Prime Minister. Faced with an often violent, five-month-old coal miners' strike, economic setbacks and a series of political pratfalls, Thatcher seems surrounded by trouble. The latest Gallup poll, released last week, shows public support for the government at its lowest level since March 1982, before the Falklands war began: 37.5% favor Thatcher's Conservative Party, compared with 38.5% for Labor and 22% for the Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance. The government, recently declared the once supportive weekly magazine the Economist, is "Britain's most inept since the war." During a boisterous session of Parliament last week, a Labor member goaded Thatcher: "Your world is coming apart."

The unions remain Thatcher's greatest affliction. The dock strike began after a nonunion worker was employed to move iron ore off the docks at Immingham, in eastern England. Though the procedure was routine, the Transport and General Workers' Union called a walkout. Union leaders pressed port employers to agree that nonunion help would never be used again, but the demand was rejected. Many dockers also suspected that the Thatcher government intended to seek a change in a 1947 law that effectively guarantees them jobs for life. The Prime Minister insisted that that was not the case, and the union's obstinacy convinced many Britons that the T.G.W.U. was seeking an excuse to demonstrate solidarity with the striking miners.

Thatcher received another piece of bad news last week when a High Court judge overturned a government-imposed ban on unions at the government's top-secret listening post at Cheltenham. The Prime Minister ousted the unions last January, claiming that two earlier work stoppages had badly disrupted the round-the-clock monitoring of satellite, radio and other communications. Though the judge upheld the government's right to forbid unions at Cheltenham, he ruled that the Prime Minister should have first consulted labor leaders and the Cheltenham staff. The decision, which the government is appealing, fanned opposition-party charges that Thatcher has been acting like an autocratic empress. Said Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock, with ill-concealed glee: "You have been found guilty of breaking the law."

Annoying though this was for Thatcher, it hardly equaled the frustration of the miners' strike. For 20 weeks, Arthur Scargill, the militant president of the National Union of Mineworkers, has led a violence-scarred crusade against the government's plan to close 20 of the country's 200 pits and cut 20,000 workers from the industry payroll of 180,000. The strike has cost an estimated $2.6 billion in lost production and has contributed to the decline of the British pound (at one point this month, its value in U.S. dollars sank to an alltime low of $1.29, compared with $1.50 a year ago). About 140,000 miners are on the picket lines, but another 40,000 continue to work, a situation that has led to many ugly incidents. Televised scenes of bloody confrontations between police and miners have deeply unsettled a British public unaccustomed to such brutality.

Thatcher has come under heavy fire for not trying harder to resolve the dispute. The criticism apparently has rankled. In a blistering speech before her party's parliamentary members last week, Thatcher likened the battle with Scargill to the war with Argentina. "We had to fight an enemy with out in the Falklands," she said. "We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is more difficult to fight." Nor can Thatcher's troubles be dismissed as old-fashioned class warfare. Many of her own Tory backbenchers remain restive over the government's performance. And earlier this month, in a rare act of defiance, the House of Lords threw out Thatcher's plan to cancel elections in the country's Labor Party-dominated metropolitan area councils, which she is intent on abolishing.

In recent days Thatcher's lieutenants have been forced to come to her defense and counter charges that she lacks savvy political advisers and will not tolerate any view different from her own. "She does listen," insisted House of Commons Leader John Biffen. The Prime Minister leaves no doubt that she sees governing as a constant battle. "It is not the beginning of the fight that matters," she contends. "It is fighting until it is well and truly finished."

And perhaps she was not at all put out last week when Britain suffered its most serious earthquake in 100 years. Not only was no one injured, but it seemed like the first calamity in a long time that was not laid at her doorstep.

-- By James Kelly.

Reported by Bonnie Angelo/ London

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo/ London