GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

workplaces in the country to keep them going. So that is the origin of our

money and I do not think we should ever lose track of that and we should

respect it.

We have another tradition in the GFTU and that is of making careful decisions

and taking our time on them and that is what really we have been doing about

this new investment strategy. The EC has discussed our finances at every

meeting. Between the EC meetings we have got a Finance and General

Purposes Committee which pores over everything in greater detail and

because of the structure that we have got, the family of different concerns, the

Education Trust and the company, then all of our investment discussions over

the last two years have been discussed by the hotel directors, the Education

Trust trustees and so on. All of our plans for investment have been subject to

business plans. We have looked at a whole range of ways of trying to secure

the future of the GFTU and we have spent quite a bit of money on doing that.

We have not just looked at the option of building Quorn. We have looked at a

range of different opportunities and we have looked at them in significant detail

and spent quite a bit on them. We nearly invested in certain projects which it

seemed were going to give us a good return and I remember one in particular

where it looked as though we were going to get a 10% return on it and we were

just about to get it until the night before at the end of our due diligence at about

12 o’clock at night the final financial adviser that we got to look through the

3,000 odd pages phoned me up and said, “Have you looked at page 664

footnote 7?” and I said, “As a matter of fact, no” and he said, “The bloke who is

trying to sell this to you has been banged up in jail 16 times”. It is not our

normal world, is it, to have to look at business investments and you have got to

be super careful about it and we have been. We have rejected a lot of things

already.

Our discussions have been based on two principles really. One is that as long

as there are workers there will be a need for trade unions and by and large

trade unions are special organisations linked to the different occupations that

exist. That is why we are called trade unions. People do not automatically join

big general trade unions, they join unions that are relevant to their occupation,

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