Factories in Willesden and
Birmingham,
Not where you’d go unless you
got paid,
To build parts for bombers and
tanks,
For this is where these were
made;
And those who made those
weapons knew,
What the things that they made
could do,
To men and women like them.
But then again,
You must sell what you can
sell,
To pay for food and a roof as
well.
The system that sets a
worker’s price
Isn’t ever kind or nice,
And in the case of Lucas
Aerospace
Compassion had no place
In such calculations
So redundancies were the fix
Applied in nineteen seventy-six.
The workers’ unions would not
comply,
‘We can still work’, they said, and they asked
why
They couldn’t now make
machines
Not intended to kill and burn
‘We could design the blades
that turn
With the wind to make clean
power
Devise car engines that make
fewer fumes
We could be building kidney
machines,
Be saving lives not taking’.
And none of this was just wild
dreams
Because they built the
prototypes
Of socially useful technology.
But Management refused to see
And only words and sympathy
Came from Labour and the TUC.
So, it all amounted to a might
have been,
But one that some still
remember
To remind us that we could
have seen,
Instead of planetary
destruction driven by greed,
A world where workers control
their work
And produce for human need.
