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Asian suppliers will divert goods from the US to European markets. Since loons which weave pure man- made fibre and man-made fibre/cotton blends are also
equally capable of weaving pure cotton, the diverted goods will not necessarily come in the form of non- cottons; mills which switched from cotton to man-ande fibre when the latter had unrestricted entry into the US market may to some extent switch back to cotton when producing for the unrestricted UK market.
International obligations
11.
There is no way in which we could present a decision at the present time both to retain quotas and impose a tariff on imports of cotton textile as being consistent with oult international obligations. We should be vulnerable to the criticism that we had disrupted international trade by a last- minute change of plan and the whole corpus of the GATT would be raised against us. The developing countries would claim that the double restriction (quotas plus tariff) was a new restriction inconsistent with Part IV or the GATT. We should be accused of acting in a manner contrary to the spirit of the Long-Term Arrangement on Cotton Textiles (which seeks to provide come measure of rule of law) because we should, by using tariffs and quotas, be intensifying our restrictions (though most other industrial countries already have both). Depending on what system of quotas we introduced there would also be detailed infractions of which we could be accused.
12. We should, of course, have some answers to these charges, and in framing these answers we should make the best we could of the fact that our imports of cotton toxtiles are generous in scale compared with those of other countries. We should plead that the recent US measures had altered the situation. Wo should argue that the general level of unemployment in the United Kingdom had created an unforeseen difficulty. We should argue
that our imminent accession to the EEC was a new factor in the
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