GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

Does anybody have any comments they want to make about the situation at

Quorn? We have obviously got this debate about the future of the Quorn site

on Tuesday. (No response) It is now my pleasure to ask Chris Jury to talk to

us about the Liberating the Arts Festival. This is another aspect of the GFTU’s

activities which is relatively new, but it demonstrates our commitment to the

world of the arts and culture.

LIBERATING ARTS FESTIVAL – REPORT BY FESTIVAL PRODUCER

CHRIS JURY: Chris Jury, Writers’ Guild. I have been hired to produce the Liberating

Arts Festival which is happening in November at Exeter University. The aim of

the festival is to connect the world of radical arts and creative activism with the

trade union movement. Picking up on what some other people have said, the

central role of culture in political struggle, my own view is that people can only

really adopt an oppositional consciousness if they have got a narrative about

that there is something else that is worth fighting for, that that something else is

achievable and will be better than what is there that we already have. The most

successful political narrative of the last 30 years is what is called the TINA

narrative which is “there is no alternative”. This is why people have now widely

internalised this idea that there is no alternative, there is no point fighting, there

is no point doing anything, it is just surviving on your own and what culture

does is educate us and defines and explains to us the collective nature of our

own personal experience, so we feel oppressed, we feel bullied at work and

under the current narrative that is our own fault, if we are stressed at work, we

are bad at time management, and what culture can do is show that actually

tens of thousands and millions of people are feeling these pressures all across

society.

I do not think it is an optional extra, as someone said earlier. I think it is

actually a precursor to oppositional consciousness that if we want people to

fight for their rights for equality and social justice we have to have a culture

which promotes those ideas of oppositional consciousness and Liberating Arts

is the latest attempt. Liberating Arts came out of an initiative that has been

going on for two years between the GFTU, Banner Theatre, Townsend

68