Ventilators Not Exterminators. The Controversy of PPE Manufacturing

Two weeks ago, Babcock defence firm announced that they were going to manufacture 10,000 ventilators to help during the pandemic crisis.

It shows how highly skilled workers can design and provide socially useful goods and services when the Trident nuclear weapons system is potentially scrapped.

Babcock firm said it had "responded quickly to the UK Prime Minister's UK Ventilator Challenge" and that the manufacturing of 10,000 Zephyr Plus ventilators would be subject to regulatory approval.

Babcock is one of the factories refurbishing parts of Britain's Trident nuclear weapons system at Devonport Dock, and is part of the company which manages The Royal Naval Armament Depot (RNAD) at Coulport and Faslane.

Their factories are located in Scotland and the South West of England. It is expected that staff who routinely work on defence contracts, will be transferring to work on the ventilator project. Although, Babcock have not stated where the ventilators will be produced.

One of the problems to scrapping Trident is that highly skilled employees will be left without jobs.

CND's (Campaign for Nuclear Disbarments) have raised this issue over many decades that workers can redeploy to socially useful parts of the economy.

During the lockdown, CND campaigns are still active and they are still active online. They recently hosted an event called 'Ventilators not Exterminators'.

This was run by CND campaigners at 2 pm on Saturday 25th of April on Zoom and Facebook. Here is an excerpt from the meeting.

The online seminar was hosted by Ian Chamberlain, CND's press and communications officer.

Two prominent speakers of the seminar were Samantha Mason and Hilary Wainwright. Samantha is a policy officer at the PCS union Hilary is the founding editor of Red Pepper. Both have written extensively on defence diversification and democratising the economy.

In the first part of the lecture, Samantha was asked what she thought on the recent changes to the industrial and defence sectors since the lockdown had begun.

She raised the point about the lack of ventilators, and explained campaigners said the defence companies can work on useful products, but some defence manufacturers and politicians said it was impossible, but now they are saying it is possible.

In another part of the seminar, Hilary spoke about the industrial conversion in our airspace and said that everyone speaks about these companies and the conversion, but nobody speaks about the labourers that work in these companies, and how people are not aware of the role an engineer has when they are assigned to work on ventilators.

One of the media reporters in the seminar raised the concern that people are worrying about the ventilators being produced by a weapon contractor, and if they are suitable for requirement and what check in place.

Samantha forwarded this question to everyone watching, and asked that if they can use the product, would they think it would be safe to use or not? Which put things into perspective for me.

The fact that Babcock firm and other defence companies are beginning to make useful products such as ventilators, shows us that it is possible after all.

By Alireza Abhari