GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

zero hours contracts which left the audience to join the dots. Finally, again, as

Steve suggested, our own culture and history is needed to give us individually

and collectively a sense of our own purpose and abilities. The ruling class

invests literally millions in institutions such as Eton, Harrow and Oxbridge to

achieve this sense of purpose and ability for its own people and you have to

admit that they do a superb job in instilling confidence and self-belief to the

point of arrogance in many cases in what is on the face of it quite unpromising

material – Gove, Johnson, Cameron. How come those people do, indeed,

believe they are born to rule, that they are fit to rule? What exactly are their

special capabilities?

Last year on a course for new trade union reps Doug and myself and Keith took

students to the People’s History Museum in Manchester and for those of you

that have not been to the People’s History Museum in Manchester, make a

mental note to do so when you get a chance to visit that city. They have got a

large wall display in the foyer, probably about 40 feet high, which gives 200

years of working class history, key dates, key events, key developments, key

moments. We were stood there with a group of new trade union reps talking

through various aspects of the movement’s history and one of the students

said, “They were such giants. What are we in comparison?” For a terrible

moment I thought, “No, this is going wrong, you are not supposed to be

paralysed by a sense of the movement’s history and achievement, you are

supposed to be inspired by that achievement” and I just said quietly, “They

were people like you. Those giants that you see up there, they were people

exactly like you. You can be like them”.

I missed the email about the Shakespeare quotations and I guess I would have

an unfair advantage as a lecturer in English literature, so I will not take part in

that particular competition, but I did find a poem by Jack Lindsay from the

1930s where he reflects on that question about how you bring that history into

the everyday life of the movement and I will close with just two short-ish

extracts from this poem. It is called Production Front: “How to bring those

shadowy figures out of the starry darkness into the light of your daily lives.

Make them share your closest needs, aid your hope of a life enriched and a

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