18.07.2024

A grand get-together

Durham Miners Gala has always been a celebration of the labour and trade union movement. But this year, reports Ian Spencer, it had a special poignancy

If you are on the left, the Durham Miners Gala should be on your bucket list of things to go to before you die. It is a joyous celebration of the working class traditions - not only of the Durham coalfield, but of the entire labour and trade union movement.

In the past, it was almost always addressed by the leader of the Labour Party, who would also, symbolically, take the salute from the balcony of the County Hotel, where the dozens of brass bands stop to do their party piece. Needless to say, Tony Blair avoided it like the plague, despite his Sedgefield constituency being just 13 miles away from Durham.

By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn has always received a warm welcome. After all, this is the home of Labourism, the thing Corbyn could not and will not ever break from, with all its social chauvinism as well as solidarity, with all its support for British imperialism, as well as its limited and faux internationalism. Corbyn was here this year, but not speaking. He had to make do with waving from the hotel balcony and listening to the increasingly ironic rendition of ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’ as he sat on the stage.

Bands

For anyone not familiar with it, the bands, unions and other groups, such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, process from the centre of the city to ‘Durham racecourse’ (now university cricket pitches) - with bars, candyfloss, fairground rides and stalls with communist literature all within easy reach. After the speeches, some of the colliery bands actually go back to the cathedral for an Anglican service - the ‘Blessing of the Banners’ - and to remember all the lives lost in mining disasters.

Most people duck out of that and just enjoy themselves. For those living, as I do, in a former pit village a few miles outside Durham, the day starts early. Like a scene from The full Monty, the bands survive, even if the collieries have gone. Typically, the bands do a dress rehearsal outside their local miners hall or on the village green before setting off to ‘the Big Meeting’. If close enough, bands used to march into town, behind their banners. More typically now, a coach drops them off.

The banners themselves are a pleasure to see. My personal favourite is that of Chopwell Lodge, featuring Marx, Lenin and Keir Hardie. (One can only imagine what Marx and Lenin would have made of being on the same banner as the former Liberal and later Labour Party parliamentary leader.) I confess to an emotional reaction when I saw the banner of Dawdon Lodge, the pit where my grandfather worked. That is the thing about the Big Meeting: the appeal is at a traditional and emotional level and it is in that spirit that many still support the Labour Party, but increasingly without the expectation that it will represent the working class - never mind deliver a gradual Fabian transition to something called socialism.

Fabians there were aplenty. The Workers Party of Britain had a big expensive tent, with a large picture of the Dear Leader, George Galloway. Ironically, the Labour Party presence was rather muted. There was not even the big tea-tent Labour used to run. We had to fall back on the private sector and queue in the rain for a long time to get a decent cuppa. No-one I spoke to dissented from my suggestion that this will be symbolic of Sir Keir Starmer’s government.

Stay away

There was, however, the tent of the re-elected Labour MP for the City of Durham constituency, Mary Foy, who, to my knowledge, has assiduously stayed away from each and every Palestine solidarity demonstration, despite having been selected on a pro-Corbyn ticket. Instead, she confined herself to the safe territory of a reading in the cathedral. As I have pointed out, there was not a single senior Labour Party figure on the balcony or among the speakers. Mind you, Luke Akehurst - Zionist witch-finder-general and newly elected MP for North Durham - was expressly asked not to attend.¹

It was not only the rain that seemed to keep people away in droves. There was little enthusiasm for the speakers, which included union leaders Christina McAnea (Unison), Ian Lavery (NUM), Matt Wrack (FBU) and Mick Whelan (Aslef). There were some cheers for Lavery’s call to end the two-child benefit cap, but probably the warmest reception was for Heather Wood of Women Against Pit Closures - a reminder, perhaps, of the power of movements that extend beyond the well-paid trade union leaders into the lives of real people in struggle.

In the marketplace of ‘left’ groups there were plenty of Stalinists too, with the Communist Party of Britain, Young Communist League and Morning Star all having a separate pitch. However, in the Stalinist tent beauty contest, the award for ‘most expensive looking’ must go to the CPGB (ML), which had a large picture of Marx on the side, but an even bigger one of Stalin inside. This was situated sufficiently far away from the WPB tent to avoid an unseemly tussle - but close enough to remind us that “misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows”.²

Still, a cheerful representative of the CPGB (ML), camera in hand, called by our stall in the big marquee, to film us for a future production on Proletarian TV, their slick YouTube channel. Other lefties that called by ranged from the comradely (Socialist Party of Great Britain) to the condescending (Socialist Workers Party), to the utterly deranged (Economic and Philosophic Science Review, whose paper looks as if it has been carefully crafted from a deluxe edition of a John Bull printing set).

There were, of course, non-Stalinist groups. The Revolutionary Communist Party looked suitably relieved now the university exams are over and must be looking forward to a new wave of members in freshers week. Unfortunately, none seemed to want to chat about how the election results in the UK and France presaged ‘revolution in five to ten years’ time’.

Our stall provided not just a life-affirming day out for the comrades present, but a good deal of interest from those attending - many of whom were familiar with the Weekly Worker either online or in print. We met with comrades from the past and hopefully the future. I neglected to count how many copies of Weekly Worker I took away from our London HQ, but they were quickly snapped up by the curious, the interested and some with stories to tell. One was a former member of the CPGB (ML), whose break with Stalinism followed his trip to China, courtesy of ‘the party’. A few signed up for the establishment of a Northeast Marxist Forum, in conjunction with the People’s Bookshop in Durham, which stocks the Weekly Worker and is a centre for the left in Durham and beyond.

Symbolic

Since its founding in 1871, the gala has been symbolic of the large, inchoate British workers’ movement that strives to achieve reforms within capitalism, while clinging to the traditions of the past. On the edge of that there is a weak and fragmented left. Marx famously observed in relation to the French Workers Party that “what is certain is that [if they are Marxists, then] I myself am not a Marxist”. One can only wonder what he would have made of the plethora of sects on offer.

To some the gala might have seemed like an anachronism, a theme park of socialism, to match the nearby ‘olden days’ Beamish open-air museum. Given the 40th anniversary of the miners’ Great Strike, the theme of this year’s Big Meeting was ‘solidarity forever’. When you are there, the sense of the importance of solidarity and struggle is as real as on any picket line. Our history should be and is a constant reminder to us all that the working class has been defeated many times in the struggle for a better world, in which humanity can realise its true potential. If revolution is a ‘festival of the oppressed’, the Miners Gala is a reminder that the proletariat has not gone away.

As Friedrich Engels observed in a letter to Georgi Plekhanov in 1894,

One is indeed driven to despair by these English workers with their sense of imaginary national superiority, with their essentially bourgeois ideas and viewpoints, with their ‘practical’ narrow mindedness, with the parliamentary corruption which has seriously infected the leaders … The only thing is that the ‘practical’ English will be the last to arrive, but when they do arrive their contribution will weigh quite heavy in the scale.

I for one will be back for the 139th Big Meeting. Come and join us!

skwawkbox.org/2024/07/14/akehurst-told-not-to-attend-durham-miners-gala.↩︎
The tempest act 2, scene 2.↩︎