GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

academics and from allies that we have, both within the trade union movement

but also external to the trade union movement and, hopefully, within the next

two or three years we will also be living in a much more progressive political

environment. I am an internal optimist, so let’s see. Thanks. (Applause)

THE PRESIDENT: The next person we have on the list is Shirin. What I am

proposing to do is to ask Shirin and then Edda Nicolson who has been doing

some work on our courses to speak and I would like Lynne to say a few words

about the nursery. Then I am going to propose we have a break, so we can

have a cup of tea, a cup of coffee, a breath of fresh air, a smoke!

SHIRIN HIRSCH: Hi. I’m Shirin. I am a researcher at Wolverhampton and I am

working with Keith in partnership with the GFTU and I am particularly interested

in antiracism within the working class movement in Britain, so I have been

looking particularly at Wolverhampton and the changes within the working class

movement where you had a kind of really bleak moment in 1968 where Enoch

Powell did that rivers of blood speech and I have been tracing some of the

working class walkouts actually in support of Enoch Powell and saying, “Why

have we got immigrants here? We have got too many, there are not enough

jobs” and that transformation actually when you get to 1976 where you have

workers actually saying Asian people have a right to have a trade union and

when supporting the Grunwick strike in 1976. I am looking at that

transformation where in 1968 there were a lot of people on the left saying

actually the working class movement is intrinsically racist, the white working

class will never get on with these new immigrants and actually that

transformation so that antiracism became a key part of trade union politics so

that when you had the death of Stephen Lawrence, trade unions actually were

key to pushing the justice campaign when no one else within the mainstream of

politics wanted to hear anything about it. It was trade unions who funded that

and, if you think about it now, most trade unions have brilliant antiracist

policies. In my new union we have black members’ networks, we have black

members’ positions, but they are things that have been fought for. They are not

things that were just automatically given within the trade union movement. So I

am looking at those kind of moments where that transformation has happened

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