JOHN PATTON, president of the Educational Institute of Scotland, is a Derryman, not least in his command of a well-turned phrase. Over the Easter holidays he described the CBI as “blinkered and whingeing”, and lambasted an “oppressive and autocratic” Education Minister.
But his fiercest invective was turned on former minister Brian Wilson, now in charge of Scottish industry. An STUC meeting saw Wilson embark on a eulogy of the World Trade Organisation and regret disruption to its meetings.
The enragedEIS supremo said that far from being “a cosy gathering of benign philanthropists”, the trade summit was more of a “covert caucus of multinationals whose principal mission, driven by greed, is to maximise shareholder profits around the world by minimising wages to non-trade union labour in the poorer nations”.
The outburst was well received. Patton’s three-year stint as head of English at a secondary school in Zambia probably gave him an edge over Wilson on the economic facts of Third World life.
