lucas plan

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.