England Politics

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.

The badly battered Labor Party, trying to pick itself up off the floor after four successive national election defeats by the Conservatives, will choose a new leader July 18 with flickering hopes that he will breathe new strength and credibility into the party. It will be the new leader's task to keep Labor from fading into insignificance, going the way of the once-powerful Whigs and Liberals toward history's dustbin.

In addition to the possibility of voting in fresh national leadership, next month's British elections will mark the retirement of a record number of members of Parliament, including some of the heavyweights of British politics. The departures will make room for new blood in the Commons this year--but also will sever Parliament's last ties to that older generation of lawmakers who were the World War II giants, such as Winston Churchill.

Suddenly, Prime Minister John Major, the fair-haired boy of British politics, is in trouble: Nothing seems to be going right for him, and he faces a potentially hostile audience at the annual conference of his ruling Conservative Party next week. Although Major led his party to victory only last April and thus does not face another national contest for about four years, many Tories fear that he may have lost his grip--particularly in the field of economics, his specialty.

British political dinner parties are noted for wicked tongues and barbed depictions of those in public life--but the juicy, cutting remarks tend to circulate privately and rarely get into contemporary print. And the memoirs of government officials often lack sting. But these days, the British political world is braced for a full-frontal assault by former Conservative government minister Alan Clark, whose diaries covering his days of service in the Thatcher government are about to be published.

The ruling Conservative Party suffered a crushing defeat Thursday when its safe parliamentary seat in the Christchurch constituency was won by a Liberal Democrat with a margin of more than 16,000 votes. The tally showed a record-breaking 35% swing away from the Conservative Party in a parliamentary by-election, and it was widely interpreted as a public repudiation of Prime Minister John Major's government.

Prime Minister John Major faced further acrimony within his Conservative Party on Sunday after the press published an off-the-record conversation in which he insulted three Cabinet colleagues. The flap came at the end of a trying week in which Tory rebels joined opposition forces in Parliament to try to derail the Maastricht Treaty on European union. Major had to threaten a national election to restore party discipline and crush the mutiny.

Besides firmly supporting John Major as prime minister, the Conservative Party wants Britain to enact some of the toughest law-and-order measures that this nation has seen in contemporary times. Receiving a standing ovation at their annual party conference, Home Secretary Michael Howard this week demanded that 27 separate new measures be put into law to deal with what he called "a tidal wave of concern about crime" in Britain.

Police arrested 27 people Sunday during a violent confrontation between opponents and supporters of the far-right British National Party, which won a local election in East London last week. Dozens of members of the National Party clashed with hundreds of protesters carrying banners of the Anti-Nazi League after the rightists gathered in a working-class district to pass out leaflets.