MANY YEARS AGO, I remember standing on a hill overlooking Skelmersdale and thinking that if this was meant to be the New Jerusalem they could keep it. That's how it was planned. Out of the backstreets of Liverpool came thousands of young people seeking new homes, new jobs and a new life.
In return they got the highest density housing in the country and the longest dole queues.
With last week's announcement that state-built and state-financed Courtauld's factory was closing in the town, another 1,000 faced the prospect of the dole. It was only in January that 2,000 workers at Thorn Electrical similar treatment. Courtclosure will boost the local unemployment rate to 20 per cent.
In both cases the Labour left and Communist Party are arguing that the trouble is imports - cheap mass produced television tubes and textiles swamping a shrinking market. Foreign goods now take per percent of the British textile market.
Predictably enough, the call has gone up for import controls. But it is a call that must be decisively rejected if the 4,000 jobs threatened throughout Courtauld's empire are to be saved. Why?
1. Import controls would boost prices. The Price Commission has just reported that price rises totalled a staggering £1,800 million in the three months June to August. That was before the pound plummeted again. That was before the latest round of Ban cheap imports and that figure will increase still further. class people will be forced to buy more expensive British goods. Any increase in domestic production would be paid for entirely consumers working class.
2. Import controls would not save jobs. If working people are forced to pay more for British textiles instead of foreign ones while pay rises are being curbed, then these same people will have less to spend on other goods.
Jobs 'saved' in one industry by these methods would cimpy hallar, the LEY. NELSON AND DISTRICT TEXTILE WORKERS [UNION! БЛіВС 1870 BOLTON DİSTRICT WEAVERS Those arguing for import controls now have done nothing to fight wage restraint, which has already slashed living standards.
3. Import controls fuel racism. If you can keep their goods out, why not keep the blacks out and give their jobs to the white unemployed? That's what the racists argue, and the Labour left and Communist Party fall straight into the trap with controls.
Where could Britain exclude goods on any large scale from, anyway? Not from major capitalist powers like the States and West Germany, who could do the same to Britain. Only from the planned economies of Eastern Europe and more importantly countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America already crushed by imperialism. We would be making their misery worse and cutting British workers off from their only allies in the struggle against lue manmadonais — me Inter national working class.
Rut the kluff of the lefto ic shout to INDU.
DISTRICT WEA
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