- The issue here is who controls technology and who should control technology?

And should it be used to free people or should it be used to enslaved people?

- A senior government minister was saying to us, "Well, okay, if you're not happy with what the company's saying, you come up with a plan."

- The power we have, as the people on whom the system depends, could be a source of hope.

So it's not unrealistic to think, how do we use that power?

- Coming up on "Laura Flanders & Friends", the place where the people who say it can't be done take a back seat to the people who are doing it.

Welcome.

(upbeat music) Prodded by fear of both Russian aggression and American abandonment, NATO allies such as the United Kingdom have recently agreed to increase military spending so as to devote 5% of their total economic output towards the military over the next decade.

As Europe pledges to re-arm, other priorities are predictably enough on the chopping block, - [Protest Leader] Climate justice and reparations.

- [Protesters] Tax the rich and corporations.

- There's always money for more weapons to bomb kids in places like Gaza, but there's never money it seems to protect the most vulnerable, to invest in a secure future that isn't on fire for young people.

- And it's the same in the U.S. - [Reporter] The Bill boosts spending on immigration enforcement with more money for the border wall and for ICE.

It beefs up military spending and it calls for funding the so-called Golden Dome, a U.S. Air missile Defense system.

- Governments always tell voters that on the upside, spending on the military is good for jobs.

But 50 years ago, employees at a huge military contractor called Lucas Aerospace in the United Kingdom decided there was a different way to think about bombs and bottom lines.

Their approach, known as the "Lucas Plan," put workers at the center and redirected production away from bombs towards goods that actually helped society.

At the time, 70% of the revenue of Lucas Aerospace came from military contracts paid for by the government, but really paid for by the taxpayer.

The company designed and made everything from engines for fighter jets to satellite antennas.

Faced with cuts, the workers at Lucas proposed using their same skills and expertise to make all sorts of alternative products, including wind turbines, hybrid cars, and solar panels, all backed up with prototypes and hundreds of pages of argued detail.

A half century ago, the Lucas Plan received both nationwide and international recognition as a challenge to the way that governments typically set priorities.

Its vision?

Well, it's as relevant today as it was the day it was first conceived.

- It's one of the most remarkable exercises that's ever occurred in British industrial history.

- We thought that we have a very hardy, skilled, very competent workforce, and we have the intelligence to devise, for the endeavor, to solve the problems for ourselves.

- Because it's a very small step to go from power generators on aircraft to wind turbines.

And you'll see things in there, cheap, efficient heating systems like heat pumps, hybrid engines for motor vehicles.

- What the corporate plan was saying was, you make socially useful products.

And when we look at cutting back on defense, what could you do with the skills that you've got with the capital that you've got?

What could you make if you weren't making that?

- Skills, capital, an engaged and talented workforce making socially useful products instead of military hardware?

Well, we wanted to learn more so we went to the UK.

Not so far from Parliament, we came to the Mayday Reading Rooms, a Left wing library and archive that contains all the original papers of the Lucas Plan project.

Up stone stairs in an old building on Fleet Street, it was quite a place, and that's where we met up with Khem Rogaly from Common Wealth to ask him more about the situation that people find themselves in the UK today.

Rogaly is the author of a 2024 report called "A Lucas Plan for the 21st Century."

- We've got cuts in the rest of the economy, so we've seen cuts to welfare, cuts to the aid budget.

They're talking about cuts to green infrastructure spending.

And that's really shocking to me because actually, when you think about Britain's security, one of the biggest security threats that we face is that we don't have a real sustainable supply of energy.

And when you look at defense spending and you compare it to other areas of public spending, I think this is key.

And there's evidence from both the U.S. context and from the European context on this, compared to investment in public services, investment in environmental protections, investment in solar energy, investment in wind energy, defense spending produces fewer jobs and less economic benefit than any of those other areas.

So really, what we're talking about is a poor economic choice that's being made to posture and kind of look like a big military power in a world that's growing increasingly unstable.

- Now, it's not the first time we've heard these kind of arguments, or that people have felt these kinds of fears on the continent.

Let's look back to the 1970s.

What was that environment like?

How different?

How much the same?

And what can you tell us about the conditions in which the Lucas Plan arose?

- It was a moment of global insecurity.

You know, Britain had been this major imperial power, and it was really kind of facing up to its transition away from that.

So you had the workers at Lucas Aerospace specifically facing the fact that their companies were being kind of folded into these bigger multinational firms.

That jobs were being cut because, and I think this is the key for the moment we're in now, when you debate the kind of investment in a new weapon system or new piece of military equipment, over time what you see is that governments fall back on these arguments on jobs.

It's very hard to persuade people that that's rational or that that's necessary or even realistic for a country like Britain.

So instead they say, "This is gonna be good for you.

This is gonna give you a good job.

You're gonna have fulfillment working in a missile factory or something like that."

And I think what really kind of sticks out to me about the Lucas Plan is that through their organizing and not necessarily, you know, starting to deliberate, you know, starting out with a deliberate idea of doing this, they really kind of pulled apart that jobs argument.

- So happy to see you.

- Fantastic.

(laughs) - Author scholar, Hilary Wainwright assisted the workers at Lucas Aerospace soon after she left college.

She did research for what they called their Combine, which was an innovative and independent body comprised of shop stewards from all the different parts of the Lucas Company.

You got involved with the Lucas Aerospace workers when you were pretty young.

Do you remember how it happened and what what those days felt like in the early '70s?

- Yes.

I mean, I was a very radical socialist as a result of being involved in the movements around '68 and the Vietnam War.

I also always believed, I suppose, influenced by Marxism, that the working class had the capacity, the knowledge, not only to resist, but to create an alternative economy, you know, so that their involvement was key.

And how to achieve that was a question of strategy, but also just day-to-day practice.

The unions nationally, the big bureaucracies were not adequate to deal with these companies.

Neither were, you know, shop stewards committees in one particular, any one particular factory.

They needed to come together across the company and develop a strategy for confronting the company.

So they basically, not employed me, but they took me on as a volunteer to kind of go around the factories and find out, you know, the different conditions, the different problems, and then I'd write it up and present it to the next combine committee.

And then there was an organization, a very impressive organization that's maybe relevant to today, which brought together these shop stewards committees not just across engineering, but across the whole economy.

And then eventually, as redundancies and closures hit, the question became how do we respond?

And the Lucas workers were the ones that had the alternative, a plan.

- Mass layoffs and benefit cuts don't have to be the only response to times like these.

50 years ago, workers at Lucas Aerospace gathered here at Wortley Hall in Northern England to come up with an alternative plan.

They called it the Lucas Plan, and it put workers at the center.

Among those who gathered here that day were Brian Salisbury and Philip Asquith.

- We as a combine looked at potential solutions for defending our members' jobs because 70% of the work of Lucas Aerospace were military contracts paid for by the government, but really paid for by the taxpayer.

There were job losses right, left, and center, and none of the solutions to us seemed to match our situation.

Trade unions were campaigning for the retention of existing product lines that nobody really needed.

And all of the struggles that were going on, none of them seemed relevant to us.

So we wrote to the Secretary of State for Industry and the Labour government one, Tony Benn.

We met with him as a combine.

And Benn said, "Defense cancellations have a long lead time.

You have lots of skills.

Why don't you draw up an alternative corporate plan to the companies and don't ignore intermediate technologies?"

So that was the first time that Benn had ever met trade unionists without national unions to referee and comptrollers and also without civil servants.

It never happened again.

- We were faced with the fact that a senior government minister was saying to us, "Well, okay, if you're not happy with what the company's saying, you come up with a plan."

So that was a challenge to us in a way.

That's when we had that big debate, a big debate on what we should put forward as a plan.

And it came out as a result of that, we started to think not only just as producers, but as consumers as well.

You know, I mean, you go there, you go to your workplace to get as much money as you possibly can, and if the company does something that you're not happy about, you resist it by strike action or whatever action.

And we'd done all that you see.

But now we were talking about putting forward an alternative.

And that was a different move, which really had to change our mindset.

- Under the banner of socially useful production, the Lucas workers came up with over 150 alternative products that they could be making, including wind turbines, hybrid cars, expanded production of kidney dialysis machines, and a so-called road rail vehicle that was designed to switch efficiently and cheaply between traveling on railroad tracks and on roads.

- [Speaker] What the plan was calling for was socially useful and needed products produced in a socially desirable way.

But this is an approach which to some extent, challenges existing concepts of profit.

- Mike Cooley: Whether a product is regarded as profitable or not, really depends on the value that the government and society puts on it.

For example, it is regarded as profitable to make harriers but not profitable to make kidney machines.

Now it's the same customer, the government.

So it just depends on what price the government's put on it.

And does one expect a hospital or a school to be profitable?

- Alternative energy sources were a natural thing to look towards because we took the point of view, if there's no longer a requirement for international security to have the weapons, then we ought to make something that improves the quality of lives of ordinary people rather than detracts from the quality or even kills them.

So alternative energy was natural, and if you read the plan you'll see in there, and bear in mind, this is in 1975, the year before its launch, you'll see we advocate the building of wind turbines, which the company described as somewhat in the brown bread and sandals realm.

- We were talking about heat pumps, they now have been promoted as being the answer to some of the environmental problems.

Hybrid cars.

Which manufactures don't produce hybrid cars?

- Also solar energy, electric car technology, you name it.

- We were invited abroad.

I went to Sweden twice, I went to Germany, and then after I'd left Lucas Aerospace, I went to America.

So it was received well.

- And it's still being received well.

- [Laura] Well, it wasn't received well by Lucas Aerospace.

- Well, Lucas Aerospace wouldn't accept it, would they?

Eh?

They wouldn't accept it because we were a direct challenge to them.

- Naturally, the national officials of each union had their vested interests.

So they didn't like it.

The company didn't like the strength of the combine.

So interestingly, the supposedly Left Labour government had a vested interest with the company, had a vested interest with the national officials to defeat the combine.

And at the end of the day, that's what they did.

We were defeated by our own.

- [Laura] All these years later, Khem Rogaly has been giving the Lucas Plan a second look.

- I produced a new report called "A Lucas Plan for the 21st Century."

And the report was based on interviews with some of the former Lucas Aerospace stewards, but also interviews with present-day workers in the military industry.

And basically the idea of the report was to look at the nature of the military budget, what it actually supports in Britain, whether it's to do with national defense or to do with the projection of global power.

And to think of what the benefits could be of approaching that realistically, appraising where we need production for defense, which we do need of course, and where production can be converted to address other issues like the climate crisis.

And what was really interesting is that through speaking to workers, I basically came to this sense of how normal conversion is, how normal it is as an industrial practice that obviously, you retool sites when you need to, when there are other needs.

And these are sites that rely on government money.

So it's actually the government that can decide that they can retool them if they want to.

I argue that that should be done under public ownership to keep as many benefits from production for the public as possible, rather than letting it go to the shareholders of these private companies and the massive profits that we know that they're making.

Through meeting Brian and Phil, through speaking to workers in today's military industry and interviewing them about their experiences, I think I found out that there were a lot of myths around the military sector around how much people really want to work in that sector.

Because when you start to make challenges to say arms exports that are going to countries like Saudi Arabia or Israel being used in, you know, wars in Yemen and Palestine, you get told, "Well, there's nothing we can do about that because of the jobs."

And actually, I think through this process of researching the Lucas Plan, I've kind of found that that argument doesn't stack up.

- The great thing about the Lucas Plan and listening to the shop stewards was that they went beyond protesting what was, to really imagining what might be.

And they remind me constantly to think of what we are not doing because we're doing this.

And their priority that they mentioned over and over was addressing climate.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

And I think actually just reflecting on this present moment in Britain and Europe and the U.S., it's really insightful to think of that Lucas Plan alternative.

Because what we already have in Britain specifically and in the U.S. are large military industries supported by government spending, which the government directs what is produced and the government could direct alternatives, keeping obviously what is essential for national defense, for actually defending the nation, but identifying where production can be shifted.

And I think that that's really a hopeful alternative to offer, that workers have the power to offer, especially when we're looking 'round at an economy where the government's cutting, spending in other areas where it doesn't feel like we can really address climate change.

And actually, we have this industry that's already there, money that's already on the table, and the potential to redivert it, to make our economy actually more resilient, make our country more secure because we are facing up to what genuinely threatens us, which is the climate crisis, most of all.

- How important would you say, this experience with the Lucas Aerospace workers was to you personally?

- Well, I think for me personally, it was kind of both a vindication of my belief that change comes from, you know, to use a phrase, the bottom up, the power of workers and working people, people without official state power or money.

And that their collective strength and their collective capacity, their shared knowledge, is fundamental.

So one of the most important things that's influenced me, which in a way is also brought out by the women's movement, is the importance of what we would call tacit knowledge.

You know, knowledge that isn't codified in books or documents or programs, you know, but is tacit, is implicit.

So in the case of the women's movement, the way that we would share experiences through consciousness raising groups and out of those consciousness raising groups, which could be seen as, you know, gossip, but reflective gossip, would come amazing policies that were really rooted in our needs and our knowledge of our needs.

And similarly, the Lucas Plan, you know, in a way, it came out of that tacit knowledge.

That knowledge which is built into skill.

Things sometimes, things we do but cannot tell, So that sort of knowledge which was tapped by the plan, and that's why the plan had an emphasis on producing things.

So it actually produced, you know, examples of the products prototypes rather than just lots of verbiage.

- The thing that you emphasize in the very beginning of your book is that fear of war, of mass unemployment, of instability, can sometimes feel overwhelming.

And particularly I think in the U.S. right now, people feel that they're up against extraordinary power with extraordinary money at a time of geopolitical change globally and a lot of instability at home.

And I think they feel pretty powerless.

So there's something about the Lucas Plan, to me, that at least gives you a certain amount of courage.

But maybe it's unrealistic.

- What's realistic is a lot to do with you know, what you think your power is.

But you can sort of create self-fulfilling prophecies of defeat just by being passive.

And actually, I think the Lucas Plan and the women's movement both showed that you have power because there's so many features of the system that you hate that depend on your complicity with the arms industry or high carbon production.

If the workers on whom that production system depends, I mean, management couldn't produce any of these amazing military or high carbon products with all their disastrous, damaging, destructive features.

But the workers actually know how they work and they also know the technology and they know that technology could produce completely different things.

And that's what the Lucas Plan showed.

So I think that sense of the power we have as the people on whom the system depends, could be a source of hope.

And so it's not unrealistic to think how do we use that power?

- How might our world be different perhaps, or at least our economy be different if the Lucas Plan had been accepted 50 years ago?

- [Narrator] Tony Benn, now Secretary of State for Energy, sees the Lucas Initiative in a longer term perspective.

- It is not possible to change decisions in a complicated society in 24 hours or one year.

And after all, Robert the Bruce, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

And I just refuse to believe that effort of this quality and character is wasted.

It may take a bit of time.

After all, there many things advocated in the middle of the 17th century by the levelers that have never been implemented, you know, in Britain.

So you've got to take a proper perspective.

- If the government and the company had agreed to implement the Lucas Plan, it would be a radical reorganization of the production process to actually make life in the factory more productive.

People are happier when they're making products that will save people's lives and enhance their lives rather than making things that will rust away in three years or things that will kill people or poison people.

So it would be a completely different set of values.

But that's not something that you work to overnight.

You're talking there a five to 10-year process.

And I think one of the things that the Lucas Plan has done is actually made it fairly clear to people that there are choices.

Technology is developed by humans.

And the issue here is who controls technology and who should control technology and should it be used to free people or should it be used to enslave people?

- My son always talks about me as "Trouble is father, you're still living in the '70s."

He talks about the realistic situation now is that, you know, time has moved on and places are not unionized.

So it is difficult.

- [Laura] You recommend to a young person to get involved the way you did?

- Well if they don't, if they're gonna leave it to the politicians, if they're gonna leave it to the market-led economy, it'll only get worse.

It's got worse since the '70s.

It hasn't got better.

Yeah, I always saw the '70s as a crossroads.

It could have gone either way.

We weren't the only ones.

It was a time of real sort of unrest from the grassroots if you like.

And instead of the Labour government taking advantage of that and shifting the balance of power to working people, they missed that opportunity.

Once the Labour government was defeated in '79, Thatcher came in along Reaganomics, and neoliberalism was born.

- [Laura] Are we at another turning point like that now, do you think?

- I think this, there's gonna be a coming together.

I hope there will be.

I wouldn't be sitting there doing this with you if I didn't think it would be.

(laughs) I've got grandkids and great grandkids that I'm thinking about in the future, you see?

- So we're ending up back at this lovely Lefty library, but not because we think the Lucas Plan is some quirk of history.

No, far from it.

The Lucas shop stewards were forward-thinking people prompted by a politician.

They got curious, came together and came up with a plan.

Did their Lucas Plan get implemented exactly as they wrote it?

No, but did it inspire lots of people?

Absolutely.

50 years from now, will we have the political will, the people power, and the priorities to organize our lives and work and society and resources differently?

Well we better.

But one thing is certain.

We won't end up in a different new destination if we don't come up with a clear plan.

Till the next time, stay kind, stay curious and thanks for joining us.

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