The Lucas Plan
Laurence Hall on a new way forward for nuclear disarmament
With the parliamentary approval of Trident renewal, our witness for nuclear disarmament must find a new way forward. Along with my fellow Young Quakers within Young Friends General Meeting I did my best through our Trident concern to oppose all nuclear weapons alongside other Quaker and non-Quaker organisations. Yet if I, you and others are to win this struggle we need more than opposition. We need an alternative. Thankfully, our Peace Testimony goes beyond simple opposition to war and militarism to a positive ethic of democratic equality. If ever there was a movement for an alternative model that embraced our testimony to its fullest, it was the one sparked by the Lucas Plan.
In 1976 the workers of the arms company Lucas Aerospace were given the false choice that military production workers face today: produce arms or face mass redundancies. The workers, led by their shop stewards, rejected both in the most radical of ways. They put through an alternative plan, which was anti-militarist all the way through.
First, Lucas would produce peaceful, socially useful products with no production of military hardware nor products solely for profit. Yet, the decision process as to what was a peaceful, socially useful product also rejected militarist hierarchy. All workers, alongside the wider community, used democratic egalitarian methods to assess what social needs would be addressed by the skills of Lucas workers. The result was a plan to produce a range of products far ahead of their time that serve immediate medical needs, long term environmental needs and much more.
The peace principle of democratic equality was not just restricted to the product design. Management would not be by managers, who could not be held to account, ruling over their workers, like generals over their troops. The management and ownership of all aspects of production would be governed by the industrial democracy of all workers.
This anti-militarist ethos was extended even to the technology used within production itself. They would reject technological processes which disempowered, deskilled and destroyed workers. Instead, they would draw up new technology that would allow empowered workers to use their creative powers to the full extent.
Over the next decade the Lucas Plan started a movement of workers, community activists and leftist politicians to make the vision a reality in the UK and beyond. What lay at the heart of this movement was the very Quakerly idea of democratic equality – in which everything must be controlled by all for the empowerment of all. Yet, their hopes of a world purged of militarism were crushed by Margaret Thatcher and the neoliberal right.
However, today the current rise of radical movement politics within and beyond the progressive political parties of the UK means that the core of the Lucas Plan can be revived once more as part of a wider struggle to replace nuclear weapons and all forms of militarism with something radically different. No longer will we only object, but we will create a new peaceful alternative.
There is a conference on the Lucas Plan in Birmingham on 26 November.
Further information: http://lucasplan.org.uk
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