GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

and for us, all the unions. It is an asset for the community. We are talking

about the Kurdish Festival. It is an asset for society in general that we can use,

so it is something that £5.5 or £6.5 or £13 million sat in the bank was never

going to do. It was just there, it was doing nothing. It was dead money until it

went away. It is a benefit to us. It is something that we, the trade union

movement, own. We are all members of the TUC and if you look at the

education programme that is supplied by the TUC it has gone down, hasn’t it?

The ten day courses when you used to just turn up, that is where you learnt

your basic education. That has gone. Now the beacon in education within the

trade union movement is the GFTU and it is not static, if you look at the new

programme that has gone out, it is actually a growing programme. We are

looking at more things, we are delivering more ideas out to trade unionists and

to people in general that is going to be of benefit.

I think the even braver decision as far as the Executive goes is that we should

expand. People are going to say, “In these times it is a bit dodgy to do that”.

There is nothing surer than at the moment if you leave money in the bank and,

okay, Doug is right, over the last two years we have done pretty well in our

investments, but I remember the four years before that and we are talking

about crisis meetings where it was going down, if you leave it in the bank and

things do not work out right on the election and Brexit does not turn out quite

right, then that money is going to go away. By investing in a building, in the

programme at Quorn we have an asset that, okay, it might go down, we all

know house prices have gone down, but the one thing that always happens,

they always come back and we are sitting on an asset where we do not owe

money on it. We own Quorn. We have paid for that with that money we had in

the bank, we have bought it, and so we sit on an asset that we can realise if we

really had to.

Think about what the build is asking for. We are going to build ten houses,

they are all probably going to be worth round about £300,000 each, that we will

own, that we will rent out, they will bring money in every single month and if we

ever got into difficulty we have an asset there that we can realise, we can sell

that. We cannot sell the money that is dwindling in the bank. We have got a

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