The Lucas Plan (1976): skilled insiders who named the discourse and planned their way out

In January 1976 the shop stewards of Lucas Aerospace, Europe's largest maker of aircraft systems, published a "Corporate Plan: a contingency strategy as a positive alternative to recession and redundancies". It proposed about 150 products the firm's 13,000 manual and staff workers could make instead of military equipment, among them heat pumps, a road-rail bus, braking systems, medical equipment and alternative energy, each backed by a technical file of about 250 pages. This page records what the plan itself says and what became of it. It serves the audience part of Departure in place (PMC and dependency chains, Writing from inside, Departure: spatial and social) and bears on Dark discourse.

How it was made

The idea came from Tony Benn, then Secretary of State for Industry, who told 34 delegates of the stewards' combine committee in November 1974 that he could not nationalise Lucas Aerospace and suggested they draw up their own corporate strategy instead. The combine was itself an unusual body: senior stewards of all twelve manual and staff unions on every site, formed because management had played the sites and craft unions off against each other. The plan was built by questionnaire, posters, canteen committees and mass meetings; a steward at Burnley put it to 3,500 members from the centre spot of the local football ground. (lucasplan.org.uk ; lucasaerospacecombine.co.uk)

What the plan says about the discourse it worked inside

The plan's own introduction is the part that bears most on James's ideas. It notes that capable school-leavers were turning down places in science and engineering because they saw science and technology as "de-humanised and even brutal". Then it says where the problem lies: "these problems arise, not because of the behaviour of scientists and technologists in isolation, but because of the manner in which society misuses this skill and ability". Engineers and workers, it goes on, "have a profound responsibility to challenge the underlying assumptions of large scale industry" and to "assert their right to use their skill and ability in the interest of the community at large". It sets this against "the gap which exists between that which technology could provide, and that which it actually does provide", with the example of a society that can build Concorde but cannot keep pensioners from dying of hypothermia. It also attacks seventy years of "scientific management" that tried "to reduce the worker to a blind unthinking appendage to the machine". (Plan text, read in full from the scan at ecology.iww.org)

The stewards also foresaw how the plan could be taken from them. They warned that the company might "simply take parts of the Corporate Plan", draw off "the money spinners", perhaps make those abroad, and drop the socially useful products while still making people redundant. So they proposed presenting only part of the plan at first and testing how the company handled it. (same scan)

What happened to it

Management rejected the plan outright. Mike Cooley, a design engineer and one of its most visible advocates, was sacked in 1981, the year he received the Right Livelihood Award (Mike Cooley). A road-rail bus and a heat pump were developed outside the company, partly through a Coventry polytechnic unit (UDAP) that the combine helped set up with the West Midlands County Council. The plan was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and workers at Vickers, Dunlop, Parsons and Chrysler drew up plans of their own; in West Germany the metalworkers' union set up alternative product groups at firms such as Blohm & Voss, AEG and Krupp. (lucasaerospacecombine.co.uk ; grassrootsinnovations.wordpress.com)

Its most concrete afterlife was in London, where Cooley ran five community workshops for the Greater London Enterprise Board until the council was abolished in 1986 (technology networks london).

My reading, for the audience part of departure in place

The steer asked whether skilled insiders can see a discourse of the kind James calls dark, and leave it. The Lucas stewards are a strong case that they can see it: the plan places the harm in how society uses skill rather than in individual engineers, which is close to James's point that "you can swap out every designer and the dark discourse persists". They could also redirect their skills on paper, in great technical detail. What they could not do was carry the redirection out from inside the firm; it lived on only where a public body gave it room. That is a different picture from departure in place as a household practice, because the Lucas departure was collective, organised through a body that cut across every union and site, and it depended on a sympathetic minister and later a sympathetic council.

History and sources. Written by the research session of 27 October 2026 (Trail 2026-10-27). The plan's text was read in full from an OCR'd scan of the 53-page published summary hosted by the IWW ecology site; the combine's own history pages and Adrian Smith's 2014 article (smith 2014 technology networks) supply the afterlife. Source page: lucas plan 1976. A single primary document plus the stewards' own retrospective, so stated.

Related: Mike Cooley, technology networks london, Dark discourse, PMC and dependency chains, Convivial technological futures