GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

well on them, we have done well on them in the last couple of years. It was

pretty bad. It is now pretty good. One of the reasons why it is pretty good is

because of the fall in the value of the pound and the rise in the stock markets

and that is not going to last forever, is it? They never, ever do. They do not

just go up and down, the markets, they go up and down on a downward cycle.

If Larry Elliott’s analysis yesterday was correct, which I think it was, there has

been no significant learning from the 2008 crash and if this level of non-

investment in the real economy goes on and all the problems that Larry

identified then on the basis of the fact that the banks are still largely

unregulated there is going to be another crash, so the assets that we would

have stashed on the money markets could significantly disappear overnight as

they did in the 2008 crash.

So in terms of a secure future for the GFTU, it seems to the Executive which

has discussed this at length and it was a unanimous view that we came to

several times, that this is the best way forward for the GFTU that we can see.

All investments have got massive risks. This has got less than others. We will

not put all of our assets into the £5.5 million. We will seek to borrow some of

that and we will seek to leave enough in our kitty to obviously keep the GFTU

and its level of services going for the next period. We do not want particularly

to borrow from the banks. We want to see if we can borrow in an ethically

good way so we have already written to affiliates saying, “Might you be

interested in becoming part of this project and investing a little bit yourselves on

the basis of a guaranteed return and legally binding agreements and all the rest

of it that would help this project come to fruition?” We would like to borrow

from the movements in the spirit of the debate that we had yesterday about co-

operation and shared services, that this provides a co-operative social

enterprise model that maybe we could all buy into. We probably will have to

borrow a bit as well from the commercial market and hopefully some kind of

mortgage arrangement would come into it.

We will spend 1% of the new build on art as well. We have already done quite

a bit of that and John Harris, by the way, the photographer has just donated his

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