1973. Several members of the LAW, not least Hull, were also members of the UDA and one prominent figure in both groups was James Johnston, who worked for a haulage firm on the Grosvenor Road. On 22 August 1972 members of the Provisional IRA abducted him from his workplace and took him to the neighbouring Falls Road where he was shot and killed. Johnston's murder made him one of the first UDA members to be killed by republicans. Decline Despite initially hailing it as a huge success the Day of Action saw the LAW go into decline. Mainstream unionism had baulked at the excesses of the night whilst some members were suspicious of Hull, feeling that his background in the Northern Ireland Labour Party brought his loyalism into question. For his part Hull spoke of converting the LAW into a working-class loyalist party in the immediate aftermath of the strike, something that drove a wedge between him and his closest political ally Vanguard leader Bill Craig. Meanwhile, disagreements over how the LAW should become involved in anti-internment campaigns and whether or not rent and rates strikes, a favourite tactic of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in the late 1960s, saw the movement disintegrate. The lack of a fully formalised structure meant that the LAW lost the vast majority of its membership following the formation of the Ulster Workers' Council (UWC) and ceased to exist in the middle of 1974. According to Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack the UWC was established by Harry Murray because he wanted a loyalist workers group that was nonetheless independent of paramilitary control whilst the LAW was wholly run by the UDA. Davy Fogel would also claim that the LAW was " a front organisation for us [the UDA]". However, the LAW was notable because it pioneered the idea of using industrial action to advance the demands of unionism, which reached fruition with the Ulster Workers Council Strike. LAW became inactive, but Bob Pagles, who had led with Murray and had considered joining a cross-community peace movement, instead decided to restart it. Becoming its leader, he represented it on the United Unionist Action Council, which held an unsuccessful strike in 1977. References Notes Bibliography Bew, Paul & Gillespie, Gordon. Northern Ireland A Chronology of the Troubles 1968–1999, Gill & Macmillan, 1999 Kerr, Michael, The Destructors: The Story of Northern Ireland's Lost Peace Process, Irish Academic