HARD TIMES AHEAD SAYS GKN CHIEF

Profits may have to be sacrificed altogether by many British companies if they are to beat off Common Market competition, warns the Tory Party's biggest backer.

The warning-from Sir Raymond Brookes, head of Guest, Keen and Nettlefold—comes in a review of industry published by the 'Birmingham Post' Sir Raymond Brookes Brookes says that GKN was one of the considerable number of companies that, during the past decade, came to see the opportunity and advantage of joining Europe. I firmly believe that, ultimately, the national decision to join the Community will be seen by all to have been the right one for Britain,' he adds.

But the company chairman goes on to point out that one of the immediate consequences of Market entry will be 'competition in our home markets of a strength few of us have ever experienced'.

This would come as a shock, he says. Some industrialists had become used to thinking of Europe only in terms of the advantages. But the price of entry also included opening up the British home market — and what had happened in the past was not a reliable guide to the course of events as defensive tariff barriers fell.

Brookes' article reveals the real, dog-eat-dog, anti-working class face of the market.

The GKN chief, whose £393m company made the largest known single donatior to the Tories' 1970 electior pancenes attacks ne says are still encountered all too frequently at all levels in industry.

Companies had forgotten their tariff walls existed, he claims.

'Behind these protective walls we have not only forgotten what it is like to compete against all-comers, even for our home markets; we have retained and reinforced so many historic inefficiencies —in our industrial structures, in our company organizations, in our product ranges, in our working methods and in our marketing approaches — that our ability to compete in free trade conditions is seriously impaired.' Inefficiency is widespread, Brookes goes on, and 'the discrepancy between fact and complacent belief is so great that our awakening must be painful'.

All this, of course, is a far cry from the bland publicrelations ballyhoo being churned out incessantly over the past week by every conceivable agency of the capitalist mass media.

To a relatively restricted audience, one of Britain's biggest monopolists GKN ranks 16th in 'The Times' list of top companies) is prepared to admit that Market entry means war. And he is not shy, either, about the fact that it is a war in which many • companies can go to the wall.

'What we have now done,' Brookes says, is to join a large, powerful industrial freetrade group, and entry to such a group is supposed to have both "impact" and "dynamic" effects.

•Behind the jargon, and in plain terms, an "impact effect" means invasion of our home markets by aggressive, efficient and knowledgeable exporters, attracted by our high domestic prices, already able to price competitively and very well aware that the profitability of selling here can only be enhanced our tariffs against them fall to zero?

Many companies were directly or indirectly going to lose a big slice of the homemarket share on which they had previously depended almost completely for turnover and profit. "To repel the invasion successfully may mean sacrificing profit.' Having thus disposed of the "impact' effects, the GKN chairman goes on to talk about the so-called dynamics entry.

These are by no means automatic either, Brookes stresses. In plain terms they can only be achieved by taking a profitable slice out of a competitor's home market share. And this is no easy task.

Brookes' unspoken appear to be twofold. 1.A further slashing attack on •the nationalized industries. He complains that _engineering suffers from "inescapable structural inflation', reflecting its 'dependence upon, if indeed not captivity to, the public sector of the economy'. 2 A determined new offensive on union organization at factory level. He says that 'much inefficiency arises on the factory floor and bad industrial relations and the negative attitudes of some trade unions account for some part of it'.

This is Toryism red in tooth and claw.

Brookes and his board, who are believed to refer privately to militants in their factories as 'the Luddites', are warning British capitalism that unless it seizes the initiative it will go under.

The working class, been warned.

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