leaders up to?
For a whole period after the war Britain was able to take advantage of a seller's market. Competition was not sharp and even the ill-equipped, under-financed and semi-archaic British industry could limp along. But by the 1960s supply began to outstrip demand and the superiority of the US firms over their European competitors threatened to assert itself.
Because of its concentration of capital and technological advantages, US industrial capital was able to produce at a cheaper unit cost. The US domestic market was also much greater than that of its European competitors and this provided a basis for much larger firms.
Faced with increasing inter-imperialist competition the Europeans could only hope to compete on roughly equal terms by merging their resources thus both increasing the size of their markets, centralising research and basing their production on a larger capital base. The more far-sighted members of the capitalist class in Britain recognised that unless British industry could become integrated into this process it faced a bleak, cold, isolated, future. As the CBI pamphlet-Britain into Europe-put it: *Only in this way can it (British industry) create the units of the number and scale necessary to meet world competition. As the economic crisis of British capitalism has bitten deeper, with the bankruptcies of the motor giants like BLMC and the sumn of the pound, the ruling class and their representatives have become unified on the urgent need to stay in Europe. Even the once rabidly anti-EEC Daily Express has now joined the pro-Market chorus.
Wilson and Callaghan have been convinced pro-Marketeers for some time now. However their preparedness to campaign openly for the EEC has been restricted by the need to preserve the 'unity' of the Labour Party. Every single important body in the labour movement is on record against the EEC-ranging from the Labour Party Conference, the TUC, the Coop Party, the Labour Party Young Socialists and even the Parliamentary Labour Party itself.
Wilson was therefore anxious to 'steer' Britain along the EEC road without causing 'deep divisions'-in other words the danger of left wing opposition-inside the labour movement. But the effects of the dramatic and irreversible decline of the fortunes of British capitalism have exploded with such a ferocity that like Beaverbrook's press he has had to swing into line. He knows that the effects of leaving Europe would have the most catastrophic results on the capitalist economy.
It is because of the opposition of the majority of the labour movement that Wilson has had to come out so openly. He has been forced to get off the fence and use his position as Prime Minister to appeal over the heads of the. decisions of the Labour Party and the TUC to try to get Labour voters to move into the FOR SOCIAl SOME KEY
y 29 may 1975 1E extreme right! E important questions E