List trade war — and the loss of markets and jobs which would result from the inevitable international deflation would be many times greater than the effects of any reflation of the economy behind import barriers.
Import controls are not only utterly useless in saving jobs, but they are a most dangerous threat to the working class struggle. The demand for import controls is a reactionary campaign which diverts the working class away from the struggle against the real enemy, which confronts it: the capitalist class and its State. When workers occupying Imperial Typewriters spent their time discussing how to obtain import controls, instead of howto popularise and spread their struggle, when the T&GWU at Norton Villiers Triumph discusses how to carry out a joint campaign with the owners to restrict the import of Japanese motorbikes, then those workers are being persuaded to collaborate with the very people who are putting them out of work. The employers can sit back, laugh, and rake in the rewards.
Instead of fighting for socialist alternatives and taking up the struggle for a planned economy, the 'left' propose protective measures
in the first place to prove responsibility for the bombings. The core of the prosecution's evidence in all four cases was based on confessions' which - according to the defendants, and tacitly admitted by the judge in his summary to the jury - were extracted through police torture and threats against the lives of the defendants' families or friends.
In other case studies where Irish people have been arrested under the Act, documented by the National Council for Civil Liberties, the same police methods have been recorded. This shows the real danger of the 7-day period of detention without charge, trial or access to _ red weekly 30 october 1975