Glasgow also played host to the special conference of the Educational Institute of Scotland. One of the unusual debating features was the copious references to movies. Some leadership critics cited 1984 and Back to the Future to lambast their opponents.
But David McGinty, EIS secretary in Aberdeenshire, thought Clear and Present Danger and High Noon best described the threat posed by the rebels. They would rob the union of any strategy, leaving salaries chief Malcolm Maciver to star in The Invisible Man.
The last word was left to leadership scourge Peter Quigley, the union’s Fife secretary, who thought the management’s proposals so mad and the union’s collusion so bad that he plumped for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“I move no more films,” said past-president May Ferries who clearly could not think of any.
One observer thought these film references must represent a dumbing down of the EIS. “A few years ago, we would have had Shakespearian allusions to Othello or Hamlet or something similar,” she mused.
