British Campaign Begins; Thatcher Big Favorite

Britain’s election campaign began officially Monday as Queen Elizabeth II dissolved Parliament, and Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher remained well ahead in opinion polls in her quest for an unprecedented third consecutive term.

The centrist Social Democratic-Liberal Party alliance started the campaign for the June 11 election by unveiling a platform it claimed would transform British society and end class divisions.

Thatcher, who spent the day at her Downing Street office, and the main opposition socialist Labor Party were to present their platforms today.

In a ritual dating from the 17th Century, the queen signed the proclamation dissolving Parliament after meeting with members of the Privy Council, the circle of eminent public figures who act as advisers. The House of Lords, the non-elected upper chamber of Parliament, affixed its seal to the royal proclamation.

Labor leader Neil Kinnock, at a London news conference, promised a ministry for women, declaring that women’s rights have been eroded during the eight-year tenure of Britain’s first woman prime minister.

The five-year-old centrist alliance pledged to change the voting system that has underpinned the hegemony of the two major parties for six decades, to maintain a British nuclear deterrent and to introduce a U.S.-style Freedom of Information Act.

“We aim to transform our society, end the class divisions and bring a degree of comfort to those who are unable to live a full and satisfying life,” said Social Democrat leader David Owen.

Liberal leader David Steel, 49-year-old son of a Presbyterian minister, later issued libel writs against two daily newspapers, the Sun and the Star, for carrying stories that he had an extramarital affair with the wife of a top party member in Scotland.

He had dismissed the allegation as “lies, smears and slanders,” and leaders of the other parties joined in condemning the reports.

Focusing on Thatcher

Owen and Steel, addressing a packed news conference, concentrated on Thatcher, maintaining that Labor would never again win an outright victory.

“Why should we waste time arguing with people who are not going to win?” asked Steel.

In the latest opinion polls the Conservatives have averaged a 12-point lead. A Harris poll for the independent TV-AM network, released Monday, shows the Tories with 42% support, Labor with 32% and the alliance with 24%.

In the 1983 election, which gave Thatcher a second term, the alliance got one-fourth of the vote but only 23 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.

This time the alliance hopes to hold the balance of power and force a change to proportional representation as part of its price for cooperation in a coalition government.

Under proportional representation, parties win seats according to their share of the national vote. Under the present system, the candidate who comes first in each district wins--a big advantage for the Tories and Labor. Each party has many districts where it can count on finishing first.

Steel and Owen later headed out separately into southern England and Wales on the campaign trail.

They left in huge buses painted in the alliance’s black and yellow colors and emblazoned with the election slogan, “Britain United--The Time Has Come.”

Labor also kept most of its fire for Thatcher, launching a series of advertisements with the slogan, “If the Tories had a soul, they’d sell it.” It was a reference to the Thatcher administration’s sales of huge, state-owned enterprises, including British Gas and British Telecom.

On defense, the alliance manifesto promised maintaining “with whatever necessary modernization, our minimum nuclear deterrent until it can be negotiated away as part of a global arms negotiation process, in return for worthwhile concessions by the U.S.S.R.”

The strategy, a compromise between the largely anti-nuclear Liberals and hawkish Owen, is vague and unworkable, critics charge.

Like Labor, which has a non-nuclear policy, the alliance would cancel Thatcher’s order to buy highly potent U.S. Trident nuclear missiles, due for delivery in the early 1990s.

But the alliance has no firm policy on how to replace Britain’s aging Polaris nuclear missiles.

The alliance said its social and welfare program, including cutting the current total of 3 million unemployed, or 10.9% of the work force, by one-third within three years, would cost 6 billion pounds ($10 billion).