GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

programme that breaks with the line management model of education whereby

tutors simply transmit knowledge to students and instead we are using a

dialogic model which understands education as always a two way

communications process. Our upcoming Liberating Arts event exemplifies this

approach which, to use Doug’s rather neat formulation, abandons the stages

on stages approach in favour of guides by your sides. There is another sense

in which politics is absolutely vital and that is the way in which culture acts as a

form of deep politics or, if you prefer, stealth politics. Generally speaking,

politics is understood by many people as opposition to the way things currently

are. Being in favour of the way things are is not generally seen or represented

as a political position, so support for the free market, that is just the way things

are. A commitment to nationalise the railways, that is political, or, even worse,

that is ideological.

So we are in a situation where the left has politics while the right has common

sense. Culture provides us with a way of overcoming that impasse. It gives us

the opportunity, the possibility of reaching out beyond our usual constituencies

to reach and talk to groups we do not normally talk to. Again, two brief

examples from work undertaken by the GFTU Educational Trust. 18 months

ago or so it sponsored a production in Leighton Buzzard which brought

together a small professional theatre company, a youth theatre company and a

community choir and between them those three partners designed and devised

a production about their area’s chartist history, so young people and people

who would not describe themselves normally as interested in politics were

suddenly doing research into chartist history, were discussing aspects of

radical working class history and they were making the links to their own lives

themselves. They were freeing their own minds in the process and that is a

model that we are confident could be rolled out across the entire country.

Similarly, the GFTU sponsored a short play about Mary Quaile, pioneering

Manchester woman trade unionist and at one time an EC member of the GFTU in the early part of the 20 th century and it was a play which suggested the

contemporary relevance and resonances of Mary’s work organising workers in

the catering industry, not agitprop, not didactic, but a realistic portrayal of life on

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