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up willy-nilly in alliance with them.

This is particularly the case when a crisis-ridden capitalist class is on the offensive throughout industry, closing down factories, speeding up production and throwing tens of thousands of workers on the dole.

Raucous As Thatcher's policies of slump and confrontation make themselves increasingly felt in Britain, there is rising, raucous, and united clamour both from the most bankrupt sectors of employers and from trade union and Labour leaders, for a policy of import controls to protect "British" industries and "British" jobs at the expense of 'foreign' competition.

T'he TGWU has firmly nailed its colours to the mast of import conor gurnal over space in ist adverts produced by BL management and adopting a 10Point programme for industrial expansion centred on a call for selective import controls.

A wide range of other unions -from the right wing-led ISTC and textile unions through to the Stalinist-led TASS, and Furniture Trades union FTAT, have also taken up this call, with campaigns using viciously nationalist slogans.

Total ban

The Labour NEC has gone further than most, calling for a total ban on imports of finished cars to Britain by 1982, and immediate steps to impose a minimum British content to imports.

But while the NEC vote on this policy was split 10-6, the Labour leadership-'left' and right wing alike-is united around the call for import controls contained within the PRESS resolution to be put before the Party's Special Confernece on May 31, which declares that:

"We are determined not to allow manufactured imports to continue to destroy our industries and jobs."

The blend of left' and right in the four selected platform speakers for the Special Conference-Callaghan, Benn, Heffer and Lestor-epitomises the essential unity of the reformist approach to the current economic crișis.

But on the import control question the reformists find themselves in the same camp as the Stalinists of the Communist Party on the one hand, and a growing list of desperate employers on the'other.

Capitalist firms in textiles, footwear, cutlery, silverware, carpets and man-made fibres have headed a growing pack of weak or bankrupt employers calling on the Tories to pull back a little from their policy of drivine une weakest lo le wal and to offer them a little special protection.

•BL management, too; even while forging ahead with their deal to produce the Honda Bounty, have called for restrictions on imports of other Japanese cars, and on imports from Spain and Eastern Europe.

Majority

Within the CBI as a whole a clear majority has emerged in favour of some form of import controls. The debate has shifted to a discussion of how wide-ranging such controls should be.

One school of thought, headed by the Cambridge Department of Applied Economics calls for broadly-based controls -or high tariffs on imports-as a means of spurring on expansion in British firms.

But a prime difficulty for such a strategy is the fact that out of last year's £31 billion manufactured imports, some £23 million consisted of such goods as machinery, aero engines, engineering components, industrial instruments and materials-without which British manufacturing industry would face a major crisis!

The alternative line-peddled more or less explicitly by many Labour lefts. is to call for specific, temporary controls to provide a period of convalescence for ailing industries suffering from Thatcher's surgery.

The idea would be to give these firms a period of guaranteed home market sales to invest in new equipment, cut back their labour force and impose new working conditions sufficient to increase the rate of exploitation on the shop floor.

Labour's spokesman on industry, John Silkin, straddled both strategies when . he argued at a TGWU one-day conference for a system of general controls on imports of manufactured goods. Such a system he argued "would give industry a breathing space in which to modernise".

In other words, import controls are not really seen either by employers or by reformist leaders as a means of saving jobs: they are seen as a means of protecting British employers while they bring in new equipment and techniques which will eliminate jobs by the thousand!

Not one section of the trade union or Labour leadership is prepared to challenge the central argument used by the capitalists to carry through these attacks: that industry must be made "viable" (i.e. profitable) at the expense of the workforce.

The TUC leaders start out instead from the perspective of winning reforms within the capitalist system: they are therefore passionately devoted to preserving the system's health.

Only from a flourishing, profitable capitalist system, they argue, can workers hope for concessions in terms of wage increases and improved conditions.

Yet the world-wide economic crisis of the capitalist system, and the particular crisis. of British capitalism underlines the fact that such a vision is a dangerous pipe-dream which leads in practice to the abandonment of any struggle for the independent interests of the working class.

In opposing the demand for import controls the Workers Socialist League argues not for the old capitalist ideal of free trade': rather we are opposed taunit to the notion that there is any form of "common interest" between British workers and British employers.

To defend jobs, we spell out a clear programme for independent working class action!

* No redundancies: For work sharing without loss of pay under the control of elected trade union committees!

*No closures: occupy threatened factories; fight for supporting strikes and blacking action!

*No to the "viability" argument. Open the books of the employers, their suppliers, distributors and bankers to elected trade union committees! Expose the anarchy of capitalist production based on private profit!

*For the nationalisation of basic industry: Build mass action and councils of action to bring down the Tory government! Kick out the Callaghan-Healey leadership of the Labour Party! For a workers government.

*For a programme «• public works: Create new jobs in socially useful projects under workers' management.

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