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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