GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017
redefine Ruskin but keep it true to its values and its roots. Thank you.
(Applause)
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, Paul.
JOHN CALLOW: It is a great pleasure to be speaking to you all here today. Thanks
for the invitation and I look forward to working with you all. I am just going to
outline a few things by way of introduction in an attempt to define some terms
and hopefully to throw out some ideas, the first of which, I guess, is just to
recap and say, as we have heard today from various of our speakers, that ours
is a movement like no other, a movement that was built from absolutely
nothing, but sometimes today when it is easy to get downhearted to think that
things maybe have not gone well for us since the late 1970s, that maybe we do
not have the big battalions of industry or the numbers or the shoulders to the
wheel that maybe sometimes we did. Well, where did we start from? We
started by women and men who had the courage of their convictions, the ideals
and the belief that all our tomorrows could be far greater than the sum of our
todays. It is that idea of a divine discontent, but a divine discontent that we
ought to focus that I think is important.
So when we think about the unions today in some ways we are in a privileged
position. We sit in hotels, meeting rooms like these, we have photographers
snapping pictures so they exist for the----
JOHN HARRIS: No, We do not snap! (Laughter)
JOHN CALLOW: You produce art in fact. I stand corrected! (Laughter) It is a good
point actually, but you see what I mean, that in post-modernist fashion there is
now a historical record. We have got mobile phones by which we can send a
message, a tweet. Everybody has got a laptop. You can get that message all
the way round the world in a matter of seconds. We have got photocopiers to
run things off etc. It is no longer the medieval scribe sitting there with his quill
illuminating his letters for 40 years or even the Gutenberg Press. But the
trouble is we experience, I think, a profound crisis of visibility. If you think
about popular culture, if you think about those dreadful 1970s sitcoms, you very
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