Did Nanny really know best? Thatcher’s rebellious children came of age after her sweep to power in 1979, and most have no memory of any Labor government. But crushed by the longest recession since the 1930s, they have lost Conservative faith. Major has presided over mortgage rates of 15 percent and unemployment rates of 9.4 percent. In 1987 Britons 18 to 34 years old narrowly went Tory. But plenty of 28-year-old money managers have lost their jobs in London’s financial district, and the latest MORI poll shows young voters leaning heavily toward Labor.
The wrinkled and rankled came of age during World War II. They’ve put the blood and sweat behind them, but not the tears. Worried retirees have been more vocal than in any previous campaign. They’re anxious about the limited privatization of the National Health Service that Major vows to continue and about shrinking state pensions, mauled b inflation in the late ’80s. Retirement-age Britons stood solidly in Thatcher’s camp five years ago (46 percent for Saint Margaret, 31 percent for Neil the Red). Today it’s a tossup, thanks partly to Labor’s attempt to outpander the Tories’ proposed pension hike of $3.50 a week.
Maybe it’s a case of swollen clans, but Scots have decided the nearly 300-year-old marriage between Scotland and England has run out of conveniences. By a 70 percent majority, Scots are clamoring for at least “devolution " a regional parliament that could lead to independence. The feeling that too many Scottish decisions are made in London is partly to blame. So is residual anti-Thatcherism: she scoffed at home rule and used Scots as lab rats for some of her most unpopular measures, such as the poll tax. Separatism will boost the once impotent Scottish Nationalist Party-at the expense of Labor, which has relied on Scotland’s support to maintain a real presence in Parliament.
If there isn’t dough, there can’t be an upper crust. Remember white Rhodesians, circa 1980? That’s how affluent Britons-those who made fortunes under Thatcher and those who just kept them-feel as they ponder life under Kinnock. The morning-after polls gave Labor a 7-point lead, the London stock market plunged 56 points. A Financial Times survey of board-level executives showed widespread panic: 71 percent believed Labor would devalue the pound (code words for bankrolling increased entitlement spending). Kinnock has promised not to do that. But the tippy-toppers aren’t floating to Labor. “The only floaters here, " said one company chairman, “are the people floating their money out of the country. "
If Birmingham man isn’t unemployed himself, many of the people around him are. This group of skilled laborers - hard-hats to bus drivers to assembly-line workers-still makes up 27 percent of the British electorate and may be the class that will decide the election. Last time around, enough of them abandoned their Labor roots to split more or less evenly with the Tories. But now many are on the sharpest end of the recession. They bought their Council House flats, as Thatcher urged them to, only to find they can no longer afford to live there, thanks to the squeeze of adjustable mortgage rates. The latest numbers show them backing Labor again by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, despite John Major’s working-class roots.
