Tories Slip in Polls on Eve of British Cliffhanger Vote : Election: Labor holds only a narrow lead. Many predict that no party will win an absolute majority.

As Britain’s voters prepared to ballot in today’s national election, the leaders of the three major parties made 11th-hour appeals for support in the closest contest in nearly 20 years.

Prime Minister John Major was fighting for the life of his Conservative government and for what he called the economic future of Britain, as opinion polls showed a slight swing from the Tories to the opposition Labor Party.

Labor leader Neil Kinnock expressed confidence that his party would obtain an absolute majority in the new 651-member House of Commons, thus taking over the government after 13 years in the political wilderness.

Meanwhile, the third-party Liberal Democrats, under the energetic leadership of Paddy Ashdown, were seeking to take seats from both the Conservatives and Labor and play a crucial role in the new Parliament.

Most opinion polls showed Labor holding only a narrow lead Wednesday evening, and many political experts were forecasting a Parliament in which no party has an absolute majority.

In that case, the leading party would probably be asked by Queen Elizabeth II to form either a minority government or a coalition with one of the smaller parties.

But a vote of no confidence against such a government would probably force new national elections.

The partisan British press criticized Major’s early campaign as dismal, reactive and confused, contending that he had failed to generate the electricity created by his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher. In response, he has tried to adopt a more direct style of campaigning, sometimes speaking through a bullhorn from his soapbox.

On the stump, the 49-year-old Major has sought to address the campaign’s main issue: Britain’s recession-hit economy and how to make it prosper again. He maintains that Labor will increase taxes, a move that he asserts will jeopardize any economic recovery.

Meanwhile, Labor’s Kinnock, in a seeming role reversal, has attempted to appear prime ministerial as he campaigns. Unlike previous Labor candidates, he has shunned the raucous meetings of true believers and declined to don workingmen’s garb or down pints of ale with the laborers.

Instead, Kinnock--conscious that his personal popularity rating lags behind that of Major and even of his own party--invariably appears in a crisp white shirt and trim double-breasted blue suit with Labor’s red rose symbol in his lapel. He has kept his distance from the press.

Kinnock, 50, is credited with changing Labor’s image from union-dominated, left-wing militancy. He has purged the “loony left” and helped to build a moderate political party--similar to European Social Democrats--with a group of first-rate advisers.

The shifts in the Major and Kinnock campaign roles prompted Edwina Currie, a Tory member of Parliament, to observe that Kinnock has “smoothed around the country” in a limousine looking like a prime minister, while Major has mounted his soapbox in the rain like an opposition leader.

Labor, in its campaign, has accused the Tories of botching the economy and allowing the national health service and other functions of the British welfare state to run down. Labor strategists also hope that the electorate is tired of 13 years--three successive parliaments--of Conservative rule.

To gain an outright majority, Labor must engineer a broad shift in voting patterns. That has not occurred since 1945, when Labor, under Clement Attlee, defeated the Tories, under Winston Churchill.

Meanwhile, Ashdown, a 51-year-old former Marine commando officer, has been barnstorming the country in his “battle bus.” He has insisted that a vote for his Liberal Democrats will not be wasted. He also has pushed for voting by proportional representation.

Taking an above-the-struggle stance in regard to some of the nastier accusations traded by the Tories and Labor, Ashdown has advocated government spending to end the recession and create better health and education services.

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