This article from today's LEP about some of the wonderful innovations BAe 'boffins' have come up with, to make skates that go faster, and wheelchairs that will give our athletes an edge at the paralympic games got me thinking.
Why couldn't BAe transfer ALL it's work into such socially useful projects?
With all the brainpower, ingenuity and resources that BAe have at their disposal, what wonderful technical breakthroughs could be achieved, if we allowed them to direct their talents towards projects that actually made people's lives better?
In the current capitalist economy, thousands of workers livelihoods, and much of the economy of our area depends on producing weapons of mass destruction. In a socialist economy, where goods were produced for NEED rather than profit, there could be almost limitless possibilities.
Of course, this isn't my idea. Back in the 1975 the workforce at Lucas Aerospace, faced with the threat of thousands of job losses, began to think about how they might run their plant if they were in charge, rather than the management. They came up with some brilliant ideas: Medical equipment like dialysis machines and artificial limb control systems, alternative energy like solar cells and windmills, cheap efficient public transportation systems and things that could transform people's lives, like sight aids for the blind.
The Labour government of the time ignored the workers at Lucas and their plan, but the ideas seem even stronger and more relevant today in an era of climate change and widening income inequalities, and when BAe is yet again threatening to shed hundreds of jobs.
So which would we prefer BAe to be working on - methods of ehancing people's lives, or enhanced methods of inflicting death? At the end of the day, it's all a matter of political priorities and political will - but given the bankruptcy of the establishment parties, it obviously requires a new kind of politics to deliver it.