TAKE A RANDOM sample of labour movement activists and mention the phrase arms conversion and 99 out of 100 will think of Lucas Aerospace and the workers plan. The other one will mumble "swords into ploughshares".
The trouble with the current politics of arms conversion in the labour movement is that it is effectively a continuation of the defensive response that the Lucas Aerospace Plan was.
The idea of arms conversion, it is (and was) commonly thought, is to save the jobs of military workers who will be put on the dole if we decide to stop exporting military equipment to murderous regimes or cut domestic military expenditure.
This gets the argument fundamentally the wrong way round. It is not cutting military expenditure or ending arms exports that creates unemployment - it is arms expenditure and exports that create unemployment itself.
There is absolutely no need to be defensive about this. Military manufacture has massively high capital and R & D costs and much lower labour costs.
For every pound spent on military production you get fewer jobs than in normal civil manufacture. It is estimated that for every one military worker it would be possible to get two civil workers - that is an extra 150,000 Those in the labour movement who support military manufacture because of the employment implications are helping to keep this number of people on the dole.
This does not mean that all that has to be done is to stop spending money on tanks and start spending them on the NHS.
It is crucial that the skills POR of military workers are not lost to the economy. What is required is a re-orientation of the UK manufacturing base away from military production and towards a strengthening of the civil manufacturing sector. This itself will make possible more social spending.
This does not mean that converted to civil use. Some will have to close. But it does mean that the skills currently sted on military production all be put to socially useful purposes. More jobs will be created as a result and the working class as a whole will Such a strategy can only be carried out though by a rigorously interventionist government which over-rides military and corporate interests and encourages the workers in military industry to use their skills to plan such a transformation with workers in other sectors of the economy.
This part of the Lucas Plan, worker planning and implementation, is crucial to any serious strategy of full employment and demilitarisation of the British economy.
BRITISH, American and French imperialist leaders SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 64, 11 June 1994, Page 11 "We cannot escape