GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

become more effective educators themselves. Under Doug’s leadership the

trust is transforming its offering to meet those new challenges.

I am going to hand over to Michael now, but before I do that I want to end with

a personal story. When I went to Oxford to be interviewed for a place I went to

the pub the night before with a cohort of fellow interviewees. They were so

posh I was afraid to open my mouth. One of them introduced himself as a

Rothschild and I thought, “Oh, bloody hell, I’ve got no chance at all here, I am

up against a historic banking dynasty, this university is not for kids like me”. I

was brought up in a Lancashire mill town and my family either worked in the

mill or they engineered machinery for it and King Cotton, as we know, was

deposed in the 60s and our town went downhill rapidly – not enough jobs, no

strategy to replace the industry that had been stripped away, no hope. My dad

was a UCATT convener and we were an activist family, so I joined LPYS and I

studied labour history at my local library and from the stories my dad handed

down to me. So when I got back to my digs that night before the Oxford

interview I reflected upon my chances relative to a Rothschild and I had the

inner confidence because of what I had learnt from the Labour Movement and

from its history to tell myself, “He thinks he is born to it, he acts entitled, but he

is not better than you. You know your history and you know what is right. You

stand up for yourself” and that, I believe, is what the GFTU Educational Trust

can do for a new generation, for today’s young men and women, help them

give the inner confidence to resist. That Rothschild, he never did get a place

and I bet he never met Bruce Springstein! (Laughter) (Applause)

DR. MICHAEL SANDERS: First of all, thank you very much, brothers and sisters, for

giving me this opportunity to come and talk to you. Sometimes there is a sense

that university academics live in a slightly remote world that is well away from

the day to day concerns of trade unions, but those of you who have been

following events in the news will notice that my employers, the University of

Manchester, announced on Wednesday of this week 170 academic job cuts

and I am taking sustenance from this conference and will be going straight

back to a round of meetings in Manchester on Tuesday where we figure out

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