GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

awareness, solidarity and communication. This is the GFTU’s most ambitious

educational offering in its 120 year history.

“Finally, I would like to conclude with a few lines from a poem Elegy for the

Chartist Poets by Ian Parks which, for me, sums up the importance of culture

for the labour movement: ‘The poets printed liberty on each and every page,

on each and every eye. Outside the world of commerce chimed and whirred,

the factories hummed and ticked, the coins fell ripe and golden in the hands of

guilty men while children hauled the coal-tubs underground. I call them out of

darkness with their words, the incantations of the working poor – the language

of the lost and dispossessed, the mill-hands, miners, labourers in the field, the

muffled voices straining to be heard.’ This is still a world where child labour

puts golden coins into the hands of guilty men. Precisely because of this, it is a

world which still needs trade unions and which also needs a particular type of

art. To borrow from the great German poet Bertolt Brecht: ‘It does not need art

as a mirror to reflect the world, but art as a hammer to knock it into shape’. The

GFTU Educational Trust will continue to promote art and education which

seeks to change the world”.

Thanks a lot, Mike.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Doug, and thanks to Mike and please send our best

wishes to Mike. I hope that he has a speedy recovery. Colleagues, we

adopted part of the report earlier, just the activities, so I am going to ask you

now to adopt the whole book, the finances and all the rest of it. Can I have a

mover for that, please, the whole report.

The Report was formally moved, seconded and ACCEPTED

THE PRESIDENT: Now it is a great pleasure to introduce the incoming President,

Oshor Williams.

INCOMING PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, President. Conference, before I commence my

address I have just got a message, something that I would like to share with

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