1803 22 March Briefing

Hilary Wainwright

The real prospect of a radical, transformative Labour government is awakening the imagination. This hope and the felt need to prepare for the opportunities it open up, is going someway to compensate for the industrial defeats that labour has suffered in the past 40 years.

In this context, to inspire our work over the coming months I think it’s useful to consider an attempt to prefigure in a contemporary struggle, the future that a powerful group of workers envisaged for the future. Does it have any lessons for today’s struggles carried out in the context of a possible radical Labour government?

Back in the 1970s, with unemployment rising and British industry contracting, workers at the arms company Lucas Aerospace came up with a pioneering plan to retain jobs by proposing alternative, socially-useful applications of the company’s technology and their own skills. The ‘Lucas Plan’ remains one of the most radical and forward thinking attempts ever made by workers to take the steering wheel and directly drive the direction of change.

Forty years later, we are facing a convergence of crises: militarism and nuclear weapons, climate chaos and the destruction of jobs by new technologies and automation. These crises mean we have to start thinking about technology as political, as the Lucas Aerospace workers did, and reopen the debate about industrial conversion and economic democracy.

So what are the lessons we can draw from this past experience of ‘ordinary’ people organising and sharing their practical knowledge and skills?

Lesson 1: Find common ground
The shop stewards at the different Lucas Aerospace sites forged collective strength by taking action over basic common issues such as wages and conditions. This served to unite groups of workers with very different traditions and interests.

Lesson 2: Build democracy
Immense care and collective self-reflectiveness was needed to bring such diverse groups into a more or less united organisation. All 35 (or so) delegates had the right to speak at meetings of the multi-union Combine shop stewards committee but decisions on recommendations to be taken back to the workforce were on the basis of ‘one site, one vote’.

Lesson 3: Build alliances and look ahead
Although the Combine won victories, they felt as though they were engaged in a labour of Sisyphus – getting national agreement to halt job losses, only to find jobs were being slashed in different places and not because of decisions of local management. The traditional approach of the trade union movement proved inadequate; instead the Combine produced its own experts and made use of outside help to educate and prepare itself.

Lesson 4: Building collective strategic intelligence.
‘We’re in a situation where politics is unavoidable,’ the Combine executive argued, in Combine News.
They went on to sow the seeds of the alternative plan: ‘We could insist that the skill and talents of our members could be used to the full to engage in socially useful products like monorails and hovercraft, and that these skills are used in a much truer sense in the interests of the nation as a whole.’ This led to the presentation of the case for the nationalisation of Lucas Aerospace to Tony Benn, then secretary of state for industry. He did not have the power to agree to nationalisation, but he suggested that the Combine should draw up an alternative corporate strategy for the company.

‘The only way that we could be involved in a corporate plan would be if we drew it up in a way which challenged the profit motive of the company and talked in terms of social profit,’ argued Combine delegate Mike Cooley. The Combine asked site committees questions aimed to stimulate workers’ imagination: ‘How could the plant be run by the workforce? Are there any socially useful products which your plant could design and manufacture?’ This led to 150 product ideas in six categories: medical equipment, transport vehicles, improved braking systems, energy conservation, oceanics, and telechiric machines.

Today interest in democratic economics is growing
We are in new times for trade union organisation but interest in democratic economics is increasing with the spread of green and solidarity economies, commons-based peer-to-peer production, and grassroots fabrication in ‘hackerspaces’ and ‘fab labs’. All of which has deepened ideas about connecting tacit knowledge and participatory prototyping to the political economy of technology development, as was the case with Lucas.

The lessons from the Lucas plan provide Labour’s proposed arms conversion agency with elements of a methodology for a network of organisations with an understanding of technological development not as a value-neutral process, autonomous from society, but shaped by social choices over its development – choices that the Lucas stewards showed need to become democratic.

This ‘ordinary’ group of workers demonstrated how it was possible to create a democratic economy. It is they, after all, who have the practical knowhow on which that technological development depends.

Hilary Wainwright is Co-editor, Red Pepper: www.redpepper.org.uk (if you don’t yet subscribe why not look at the RED PEPPER PAY-AS-YOU-FEEL SUBSCRIPTION? go to the website and click ‘subscribe’ . Fellow, Transnational Institute:www.tni.org http://www.tni.uk, tel 00447973 215351. Twitter hilarypepper

BRIEFING

SUPPORT THE CAMPAIGN TO SAVE THE
14 COUNCIL NURSERIES FROM CLOSURE

The Council is planning to close all 14 of its Day Nurseries. This is the recommendation of the
Review of Council Run Day Nurseries for the Cabinet meeting on Tuesday 12 December.

It means the 600 children who use the nurseries, which are in some of the poorest areas of the
city, will lose their places, and 120 staff will lose their jobs.

THESE ARE THE 14 NURSERIES
Wards Council Nurseries
Bordesley Green St Benedicts
Bournville Reameadow
Ladywood Ladywood
Lozells and East Handsworth Birchfield, Cherry Tree, Lime Tree
Nechells Bertram, Golden Start
Shard End Kitts Green
Soho Soho, Summerfield
South Yardley Oaklands
Springfield Park Road
Washwood Heath Sunshine

CLOSURE…AND PRIVATISATION FOR SOME?
The buildings will be offered to the private childcare market but there is no guarantee that the
private sector will find them profitable enough to take over, or that they would employ the staff. If
they did, fees for parents would be higher and staff pay and conditions probably worse.
Full closure of the nurseries is planned for the end of August 2018. A consultation will begin in
January with a final decision in April.

WHY THE NURSERIES MUST BE SAVED
The Council report itself acknowledges the damaging impacts of closure:
4.4.2 The potential impacts to closing the nurseries are:
We aim to produce Briefing regularly, each one on a key topic that affects union members and
their families. Often they will be topics that invited speakers cover in our monthly meetings,
open to all. We would be grateful if you could circulate our Briefings to your members.
• Loss of provision locally for children under five and their families in the named wards
across Birmingham if the childcare market does not see a sustainable model for delivery;
• Accessibility of services to existing families if they are moved or relocated to other
nursery providers;
• One hundred and twenty staff redundancies across the fourteen nurseries if the childcare
market does not see a sustainable model for delivery;
• Potential for not meeting the sufficiency duty – which requires the Local Authority to
secure sufficient early years provision;
• Implications for other services currently co-located in council buildings currently
delivering nursery services.

THE COUNCIL’S PRIORITY MUST BE FAMILIES MOST IN NEED
The planned closures are of course the result of the Government’s ongoing savage cuts in the
Council’s budget. But that doesn’t excuse the Council – it’s a question of priorities.
The amount of money needed to keep the 14 open is a tiny proportion of the Council’s budget and
the closures would contribute towards further widening of the huge equality gap in the city at the
expense of families in the poorest areas.

PARENTS AND UNIONS JOIN TOGETHER TO CAMPAIGN TO SAVE
THE NURSERIES
The campaign has started, begun by parents at the Park Road Nursery in Sparkhill and the local
Kashmiri Women’s Council. The campaign is now city-wide, calling for all 14 Council Nurseries to
kept open.

The campaign is backed by GMB, NEU-NUT and Unison staff unions and Birmingham Trades Union
Council, Birmingham Against the Cuts and People’s Assembly.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Sign the petition at https://www.change.org/p/birmingham-city-council-save-our-14-
community-nurseries-from-closure-birmingham (just search for Birmingham Nurseries
petition)

Come to the next Campaign Planning Meeting – email bkwc_uk@yahoo.com for details

Go to your local Council nursery – speak to parents and staff – get them involved

Raise the issue in your local political party branch, your trade union, your community
organisation, calling on the Council to think again

HOW TO FIND OUT MORE
• For the Council plans visit the Council meetings website for 12 December at Cabinet
Agenda Pack – Public – 12122017
• Visit the Birmingham Against the Cuts website and the Birmingham Trades Union Council
website for regular news of the campaign
• Contact the British Kashmiri Women’s Council in Sparkhhill at bkwc_uk@yahoo.com.