Editorial THE Tory Party is in deep trouble. That much is clear from the results of the May 8 local elections and the two by-elections that day.
The swing was not enough to offer Kinnock an automatic majority Labour government. But it was easily enough to bring an end to the era of unbridled Thatcherism that has not only devastated the lives of millions of working class families but by failing to
expected goods simultaneously undermined the Tories' own electoral support.
The issues on which voters swung heavily against the Tories on May 8 were ones that offer Thatcher
short of a brazen and total U-turn. Anger over permanent plummeting educational standards was sufficient to alienate millions of voters, even if Labour's half-baked and mealy-mouthed alternatives did not necessarily
advantage and win the extra votes. Thatcher's shameless bootlicking to Ronald Reagan over the Libyan bombing (and everything else) has also helped shift public opinion more strongly against US bases and Cruise missiles than Labour's leaders have been go in their timid
Indeed as Kinnock shuffles to the right with his "grey" campaign of gimmicks and vacuous promises, and ducks the tough questions on potential vote
down Britain's nuclear power plants in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, public opinion polls show many voters passing him in the other direction. Others, unable to distinguish between Kinnock's fudge and the Alliance's evasion, have clearly plumped for a Liberal or SDP vote as a -misguided show of opposition to Thatcher.
None of this is much consolation for the Tories, who may have successfully abolished elections to the GLC and metropolitan counties, but must still face the electorate in the next two years. So far there is little sign of substantial retreat from profitability of industry at the expense of the working
Thatcher remains adamant that tax cuts to buy votes are the top priority between General Election - no matter what the cost in terms of savaged public services. Norman Fowler is still forging ahead with plans largely to dismantle the
Nationalised industries continue their relentless massacre of jobs with thousands more axed in shipbuilding, rail, coal and the extinction of Cornish tin mining.
The crumbling NHS is plainly an embarrassment to surreptitious retreat from some of the more draconian cuts that have been forced into the headlines in
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Health Minister Barney "Rubble' Hayhoe has intervened to postpone the closure of London's worldfamous Westminster Hospital until after the next Election; while after a storm of protest by health
vorkers and intluential consultants, heavy
rogramme of closures at London's Maudsle psychiatric hospital has also been postponed by allowing the health authority massively to overspend But the sheer scale of the cash crisis facing the NHS as a whole rules out a complete reversal of policy: the extra funds required to stop cuts would leave a gaping hole in Nigel Lawson's sums as he calculates the next tax handouts for the well-to-do.
So what do they have to offer instead? Traditional Tory backwood rumblings about "law and order", and a full-blooded offensive aimed at restoring Victorian morality to match the near-19th century pvoerty faced by millions of pensioners, unemployed and low-waged workers.
Norman Tebbit - successor to the randy Cecil
Grants against the evils of "permissiveness" society. Education Secretary Kenneth Baker proposes new laws to compel teachers to play Canute by combining sex education with moralistic cant about the merits of the loving structures of the traditional "family" unit - despite soaring divorce rates and a mounting tide of revelations of the misery and violence - battered wives and child abuse - behind the happy facade of "family life"
Within these Victorian values there is clearly no room for any form of sexuality other than heterosexuality - and the Tory baiting of lesbians and gay men has accordingly markedly increased. In the case of a recent speech by Tory minister Geoffrey
Ton lesbians and gay men as "perverts" was linked to calls for an end to all spending on council housing, education and NHS spending, with the focus private health care and tax cuts.
Capping it all comes Margaret Thatcher, sharing with Scottish Tory women her blue-rinsed vision of a disciplinarian, property-owning society - which for the countless women living in poverty country could only sound like the sickest of sick jokes.
What else are the Tories to do? Their policies prevent them from relenting in their attack on material conditions of the working class: their only hope is to appeal to reserves of primaeval greed, ideological backwardness, irrational fear and narrow mindedness among the electorate.
To do this they need a constant supply of targets for witch-hunting against whom the forces of Tory law and order can show their relentless long arms at work.
One hapless grouping singled out for this cynical treatment was the Hampshiré hippy convoy, a column of harmless, if unwashed, dropouts, seeking to enjoy themselves on Salisbury Plain - or anywhere the cops would leave them alone.
Meanwhile the ill-fated extra-curricular activities of rom has much preparation to do if a Labour government is
With squads of police on hand, bored with endless duty escorting the war convoys of Cruise missiles on a their expeditions from Greenham Common, fingering their truncheons, and scenting the prospect of some easy licensed brutality; and with a Chief Constable whose style of rhetoric in interviews appeared lifted from Dr Goebbels, the scene was set for another bit of fearless Tory "law and order"
The hippies were hounded from common land, pursued through country lanes, then roadblocked and cornered into a patch of scrubland. There they were subjected to a court order to leave. Home Secreatry Douglas Hurd, presiding over a sky-rocketing crime wave in the inner wastelands of Thatcher's Britain, railed cynically against the hippies, branding "mediaeval brigands" them a bit of a beating.
But there was little fight back at 5am. And the upshot of the whole miserable display — a televised column of pathetic, newly-homeless, penniless men, women and children lanes, their vehicles seized and destroyed by Hurd's boys in blue, will have roused few, and done little to stir the flame of Tory support. Paul Channon's daughter Olivia at Oxford have done far more to shed light on the yawning class divisions
and welfare services. Forestry Commission themselves beyond In a sick, city them ludicrously as minded , and urged the cops to give forced to tramp the country a third term of office. the key to Downing Street. Socialist Viewpoint No. 13 July 1986 p2
widened by every Tory tax handout and cut in grants
When the millionaire Hooray Henries and Henriettas dabble in hard drugs, stirring cocaine and heroin into their champagne, and come unstuck, it is headline i news. Yet day after day a tragic toll of working class youth, squeezed out or cast off by Thatcher's scrapheap economy, resorts to the dead-end of hard drugs: week after week ordinary kids unnoticed by the media die in back streets using hard drugs, or damage
repair. There are no urgent inquiries, or government interest in them.
crumbling, polarised society such as Thatcher has helped create in capitalist Britain, with the evidence of social crisis and decay all around, the attempts to divert middle class and conservative-
voters with moralistic speeches and backward-looking panaceas ring strangely false. Tory speeches always tend to sound like blasts from the past, with their hackneyed sixth form essay style: now as the popular mood and even sections of the press become visibly more impatient, Thatcher seems to have a lot of lost ground to make up if she is to win
But who are we to gloat? The labour movement too to be returned: and major struggles on its plate to force through the right policies should Kinnock obtain
PRESIDENT Botha's announcement of a nationwide State of Emergency in