Import dressed in new 'theory' neory

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Sedgemore Clamours for 'Britain first!" and "Buy British!" have always been the stock in trade of the rabid chauvinism of fascists and the extreme right of the Tory Party.

But these patriotic jingos have now been adopted for several years by Stalinists, Tribune MPs and fake lefts everywhere, united in calling for import controls as a 'solution' to the economic crisis.

They do so because they are tied to their national bourgeoisie, and because they determinedly reject any independent struggle of. the working class.

Import controls pose a unity of capitalists and workers in one country against capitalists and workers of another.

But Brian Sedgemore, fake left MP for Luton, has discovered that his wholehearted support for import controls is really thoroughly internationalist.

He finds his evidence in a pamphlet by Wynne Godley and Francis Cripps-two Cambridge economists.

Garbled form

Sedgemore has siezed on this theory produced by bourgeois economists and reproduced bits of it in a garbled and almost unintelligible form.

Sedgemore , begins. by identifying the opposition of the Militant group to import controls with that of the Governor of the Bank of England and Margaret Thatcher-a slander on a group that have more than enough real crimes on their hands.

The crucial passage from Sedgemore presents the staggering assertion: 'Such a policy can be operated so as to secure an increase in the total volume of world trade, thereby enabling the world (!) to expand output.

Indignation

Sedgemore concludes with an outburst of indignation on behalf of the bourgeois state.

"For the moment our rulers are too cowardly to tackle the real issues. If they do not'begin to do so and stop the world from crucifying itself with the ideology of free trade, then we may find another and more precious ideology destroyed -that of democracy itself."

Those are the real international policies Sedgemore and his fake left cronies super-memployment ever miere. speed-up everywhere and the preservation of capital an a world stale. 'Into the Eighties" TUC Lord Allen David Basnett Geoffrey Drain Moss Evans Len Murray Hugh Scanlon Sir George Smit