Britain’s ‘Thatcher’s in the Driver’s Seat’

I was surprised and disappointed that your paper, which I remembered as informed and objective in matters of foreign affairs, ran the editorial (May 7), “Thatcher’s in the Driver’s Seat,” indicating little or no analysis of the British political situation and the split between Labor and the Alliance, which allowed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to come up the middle at the last election and is likely to return her at the coming one without a majority of the vote. (In 1983 the Tories actually received fewer votes than in 1979 but were returned with a Commons majority of 144).

It may well be that the Labor Party is in terminal decline, but you assert boldly that “the most damaging factor of all is Labor’s defense policy.” What facts do you have to back this up? Perhaps Times readers should be told that, while for many years support for “unilateral nuclear disarmament” (Britain giving up its nuclear weapons regardless of what other countries do) was steady at about 21%, following the bombing of Libya from U.S. bases on British soil, that support rose to 44% of the population. It has now been steady at 35% for over 8 months.

Labor’s policy, which your leader writer perceives as being so outrageous, actually calls for the removal of cruise missiles from Greenham Common, opposes their impending deployment at Molesworth (both of which will transpire anyway if the United States and the Soviet Union successfully conclude an agreement later this year), and the closure of three of the 132 U.S. bases and facilities in the United Kingdom.

That would mean the two cruise bases and the U.S. submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland, which is due to become redundant under U.S. military plans as a forward base for the Poseidon fleet once the U.S. Trident fleet is complete. U.S. listening stations at Edzell, Scotland and Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, as well as the submarine tracking station in Brawdy, Wales, and the F-111 bases at Lakenheath and Upper Heyford would all remain.

Labor’s policy calls for the cancellation of the British Trident program, which was intended to replace Polaris, as its “independent deterrent.” Should the superpowers reach an agreement, this too, could become redundant. What your editorial does not say, is that this policy is also endorsed by the smaller parties, the Greens, Scots and Welsh nationalists, who in many cases would go further, and that a large part of it is also the policy of the “centrist” Liberal Social Democratic Party Alliance (canceling Trident, opposition to deployment at Molesworth). Left on their own, many Liberals would go further.

The Conservatives stand alone in their wish to “modernize” the United Kingdom “deterrent” from 64 potential targets to 512 with a hard-target kill capability. Other parties wish to increase Britain’s conventional spending, and implement legislative control over U.S. bases (currently Parliament has no control over them). When a country is in as bad an economic crisis as Britain, hard choices have to be made about spending priorities.

When a country roughly the size of Oregon has more than 100 foreign bases on its soil, people begin to question the nature of their democracy, and the freedom they’re “defending.”

This American will not be rooting for a Conservative victory.

MARJORIE THOMPSON

Woodland Hills