GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

one meeting to another, the velocity is absolutely impressive, I did not think that

your skills ran to combining your duties within Prospect and within the GFTU

with fulltime professional football, so I put that to one side.

So I decided to refine my search and came up with a really interesting Ben

Marshall and I thought this might be the secret life of Ben Marshall. He is

actually the author of the Official History of the Who. (Laughter) Now, come

on, that would be one to bring to the table. I thought that was absolutely

amazing, I can just imagine Ben chronicling their rise from the heady days of

My Generation with his kind of drive towards new blood and youth within the

movement through to the classic single Won’t Get Fooled Again which, with

Ben’s sense of irony, would have been a coded reference to the legacy of New

Labour. (Laughter) But, alas, a photo of this particular Ben Marshall confirmed

that it was just another dead end.

I thought with my faith in technology I am going to have one last go and I

opened up a link and I thought that this is the Ben Marshall that I have been

looking for, this is the side that is little known within the Executive and this is

what it said: “Ben Marshall has taken heroin, lost his job, encouraged his

girlfriend to audition for work in an LA strip club and sold his reputation to the

Sunday Mirror for £5,000”, an appallingly low sum, I thought. (Laughter) “He

will not stop, he says, until he does something which will put him in jail. This he

sees as inevitable. Marshall, if not a man on the edge, is a man verging on a

serious loss of control”. I thought that is him, that is the man I know!

(Laughter) But unfortunately, again, further investigation revealed that it was

actually the then Editor of Loaded Magazine which, for those who do not know,

is a lads’ mag for airheads. So that was the end of that.

In truth, I did not need technology, despite its uses, despite its advantages. I

did not need technology to know about Ben, Ben the man. I can tell you about

him in my dealings with him as a member of the EC. It is all out there for us to

witness in the day to day work he undertakes for Prospect and within the

Executive Committee over the last two years as President, whether chairing EC

meetings or facilitating group workshops, as he did at the Progressive Summit

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