[After weeks of rumblings and rumours BL chairman…]

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After weeks of rumblings and rumours BL chairman Michael Edwardes has spelled out some of the firm's plans for dosures and mass sackings.

13 plants are to be affected, with plants at. Canley, Park Royal and "major parts of Castle Bromwich"' to be closed at a total cost of 25,000 jobs over the next two years.

But as union leaders have pointed out every 1 job in the car industry carries with it up to 5 jobs in supply, transport and other industries. BL's cutbacks are therefore a bombshell -and must be resisted.

Last weekend Moss Evans noisily declared that to cut 50,000 BL jobs would prompt "bloody revolution"

Now that 25,000 jobs are to go BL workers must demand to know just what action Evans and his fellow union bureaucrats intend to take.

Certainly, asking union officials to lead the necessary "bloody revolution" is a bit optimistic.

But as a first step threatened plants must adopt an immediate policy of occupation, and national supporting action must be called.

PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report Evans lucky, however: they can be held for up to 72 hours without charge under the so-called "Prevention of Terrorism" Act.

The underlying background of violent repression by British imperialism in the six counties is well illustrated by a press release from the Irish Republican Information Service dated August 25-the week of the Mountbatten assassination. It lists three recent instances of extreme violence by the British army against Catholic youth-none of which have been reported in the British press.

Bullets

One casualty, a sixteen year-old Belfast boy Stephen Montague, still had not recovered from a coma two weeks after being downed by a plastic bullet at a range of four feet, and then kicked in the head and beaten by soldiers before being left for dead in a Loyalist area.

He has a fractured skull, severe bruising and lacerations, and a tracheotomy had to be performed in hospital to keep him breathing.

Another plastic bullet victim was 18 year old John Mulvenna, hit by one on the forehead at point blank range while standing in the hallway of his own home.

He suffered a "depressed fracture of the skull which required over 100 stitches.

And Andrew McCrudden, a young married man from Turf Lodge who suffers from heart trouble, was grabbed by a baton wielding group of soldiers from the Kings Own Scottish Borderers, and beaten unconscious before waking up in RUC detention and finding himself charged with riotous behaviour'.

Careerists

Such violence is an everyday threat faced by the nationalist population in the occupied.six counties.

Yet the careerist touts of the SDLP who claim to speak for the Catholic minority have just issued a further vicious attack not on the army but on the IRA which-for all its political weaknesses-has spearheaded the struggle against British imperialist rule. Alluding to the Mountbatten assassination, the SDLP asks:

"Who would want to live in an Ireland created by people engaged in such acts?"

Humiliating

The SDLP's answer is clear: they prefer to live in an Ireland governed by foraign capitalist exploitation, brutally imposed by the boots, batons and bullets of the British imperialist army.

How many British workers would meekly accept similar humiliating conditions if the situation were reversed?

The fight must be redoubled to force the British troops out of Irelandl