called for withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, with Britain instead boosting its defensive capabilities through nuclear weaponry. During the 1970s the Front was British unionist, advocating for the unity of the United Kingdom. From the late 1960s onward it supported the Ulster Unionists, deeming Irish republicanism a communist conspiracy to undermine British unity. The NF argued that the UK had been too soft in dealing with militant Irish republicans; it argued that military courts should replace civil ones, that Provisional Irish Republican Army members should be interned and that those guilty of sabotage or murder should be executed. In the early 1970s it alleged that the Irish Republic was harbouring republican militants, "an act of war" that required trade sanctions. In that decade the NF endorsed the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party, but many Ulster Unionists were suspicious of the NF; in 1973 the Ulster Defence Association proscribed it as "a neo-Nazi movement". In 1985 – by which time Strasserites dominated the party – the NF called on Northern Ireland to declare independence in response to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Economic policy During the 1970s the Front identified as neither capitalist nor socialist, advocating an economic system drawing on both. It endorsed private enterprise but rejected laissez-faire capitalism, claiming that the latter places the interests of business above that of the nation. It promoted economic nationalism, calling for maximum national self-sufficiency and a rejection of international free trade. By this approach it wished to separate Britain from the international financial system, which it believed was controlled by the Jewish conspiracy. It opposed foreign ownership of British industry, endorsing protectionist and monetarist policies, advocating the state control of banking and financial services, and calling for a state bank to provide interest-free loans to fund municipal housing construction. These economic views were common across Britain's far-right, being akin, for example, to those of the BUF. After the Strasserite faction took control in the 1980s, the NF adopted distributist policies, maintaining the emphasis on an economic system neither capitalist nor socialist. In the party's material from 1980, it claimed that "Capitalism and Communism" were "twin evils" to be overcome by "Revolutionary Nationalism". In keeping with the Strasserites' distributism, the 1980s NF called for large business and industry to be redistributed into a tripartite system: small privately owned enterprises, workers' co-operatives and, in the case of financial institutions and heavy industry, nationalised enterprises. To