What Happened to the Boom

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Euphoric reports of Britain's vast new balance of payments. surplus might suggest that the economy is entering a state of boom.

But if you look at the figures to prove it-the official statistics for industrial production which are so little mentioned on the BBC-then you find just the opposite.

Instead there is a continued and deepening slump.

The industrial statistics In a series of highly coordinated raids reminiscent of Operation Motorman and the introduction of internment, the British Army and the RUC last week swooped on republican areas of West Belfast and arrested 15 people.

Principal target of the "security forces" raid was the Republican Press Centre in Belfast's Falls Road.

All office equipment was seized and bundled into army trucks.

Everything-from a duplicating machine and photocopter to duplicating stencils, photographic files and lists of postal addresses for subscribers to Republican Newswas taken.

Stripped bare

The Republican Advice Centre across the road was also stripped bare, with the police taking everything from wall-posters to rubbish bins.

And in Lurgan, just west of Belfast, the Republican News printing works was broken into.

The entire current edition was seized and the works owner has been arrested.

On Friday 16 December, the RUC announced that the printing presses have been confiscated The official reason given for the raids is the pressing need for an "inquiry" into "suspected links" between Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA.

Designed to suppress But the actions taken give the lia tr thir atomr tha come in thé form of an index representing the volume of output of al industries, beginning in 1970 at 100.

The recently published level of production for October 1977 is 101.4.

That one figure summarises years of growing disaster for • British industrial capitalism.

What it means is that industrial production is now only 1% more than it was 7 years ago!

It is 2% less than it was raids are clearly designed to suppress Republican News and therefore to deprive Northern Ireland's republicans of medium any for expressing political their views.

Democratic right

While Socialist Press sharply disagrees with the petty bourgeois nationalism of Sinn Fein, we defend to the hilt their democratic right to argue their views openly.

All the more so when the suppressed paper-Republican News-has been a focus of opposition to British imperialist repression in the Six PHOTO: And Wilson - fought the 1974 election saying Back to work with Labour'. earlier this year. It is 8% down on its peak level in the north, and as long as the RUC and UDR are there to back them up.

The immediate withdrawal of troops and the disbanding of the UDR and RUC are thus essential in order to put an end to the repressive measures enacted since 1969.

The British labour movement has an urgent responsibility to assist this struggle.

The strikebreaking Lib-Lab pact must be broken and the advocates of British imperialist occupation of Ireland within the Labour Party must be driven out. the shortAnd it less than day week These the long British emerged nearer to Lived boom in 1973. is even significantly it was in the threein early 1974! * figures show that drawn-out crisis of capitalism which in the 1960s is no a solution.

Ine main decline in production is found in the heavy industries making producer goods (machinery, etc).

This reflects the collapse of productive investment as capitalists divert resources from productive accumulaion to unproductive, speculacive get-rich-quick schemes.

In this way they try to escape from the low profits in industry but end up worsening the position of British capital as a whole.

More and more, therefore, profits can be assured only through speed-up in the factories and pushing down wages.

And that is now the strategy of British capital and its Lib-Lab coalition government.

The consequences of this to the working class are only too obvious-lengthening dole queues in an economy we are daily told has never been healthier.

But the capitalists know well enough that their picture of health is hardly even skin- deep.

Beneath the appearances is the rotting figure of capital: ism, whose one obsessive thought is how to impose a long-term historic defeat on the working class.

This has once again become a necessary condition for the renewal of the growth of capitalist production, not only in Britain but worldwide.

The imposition of such a defeat would amount to a return to barbarism.

That will be the inevitable consequence of failure to build a world revolutionary party and overthrow the capitalist system.