Tory policies exhumed—Kinnock

Press, 21 May 1987, Page 10

Tory policies exhumed—Kinnock

By

DEBORAH TELFORD

of Reuters

NZPA Birmingham The British Opposition Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, has accused the Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, seeking a record third consecutive term in General Elections next month, of trying to turn back the tide of progress.

He told an opening campaign rally in Birmingham after the publication of his party’s manifesto that Mrs Thatcher’s policies were “exhumed from the grave where progress buried them 50 years ago.” The ruling Conservatives, riding high on opinion polls that forecast a comfortable win on June 11, also released their programme yesterday for five more years in office.

Mrs Thatcher, calling for “power to the people” in a strong, wealthy Britain, promised more free enterprise with tax cuts and further privatisation of State-owned industries.

Mr Kinnock promised that Labour, committed to a non-nuclear Britain, would reunite what he said was a nation split between the rich and the poor and pledged a more caring society in which the Government would take the sick, elderly and unemployed under its wing. Painting a grim picture of a Britain returned to the poverty decried by the nineteenth-century novelist, Charles Dickens, he said it had come to “beggars in the streets and young boys on the run in the city.”