17.07.2025

139th Big Meeting

David Douglass reports on last Saturday’s Durham Miners Gala and the accompanying controversies over Reform, drink and international politics

This year’s Gala began against a flurry of controversy and anti-miner, anti-leftist posts on social media - the form is new, but the bellyaching about the miners and the gala is not. We were the ‘drunken vandals’ who had come to smash the quiet peace of Durham.

I remember the days when the city closed its shops, boarded up the windows of its genteel establishments, while eateries closed their doors to us ‘savage and loutish’ pitmen. Not so now, and we’ve become rather more genteel ourselves! The gala has by now become part of the heritage industry (and a colourful Hovis advert!). The ‘problem’ is that its character is still heart-and-soul political - still raw with class history, anger and memory. Yes, we mark our past - and it still is our past: the mining communities, the miners’ wives, children, grandchildren and the miners themselves of at least two generations who form the base of this constituency.

My colliery was killed in 2014 along with Kellingley, but there are still about 50,000 miners in minerals, civil engineering and various ores. Many of them earned their pit sense down the coal mines. When a new coal mine at Whitehaven was a real possibility, they needed 500 underground men and some 5,000 applied from all over the country. That was just six years ago. So the gala is still about ‘the mining communities’ - there were 50 or so brass bands and lots of miners’ banners, depicting various scenes of epochal battles and horizons still to bring into focus (63 lodge banners were there - slightly down on last year). Yes, indeed we have lost our ‘work selves’ - the thing which marks us still as miners, the thing which we will carry to the grave. But we are all pitmen still.

What caused all the fuss this year was Reform UK’s sweeping of the municipal elections in Durham City (and Doncaster) to the point where they now run the council. Traditionally the leader of the council has always been invited to join the guests on the platform. This year Alan Mardghum, the Durham Miners Association general secretary, told the local Reform leader that he was not invited and never would be, as Reform shared nothing in common with the DMA. It may have been wiser to let him quietly take his seat as just a traditional formality, but Alan is not that sort of guy. The gala needs council patronage and rubber-stamping to continue, so watch out for the trouble ahead.

This has been joined by a veritable tidal wave of hostile posts about the gala having lost its meaning and become too political and too ‘woke’. This was highlighted by the decision to allow a contingent of gay activists to march as a section. In the event the section was a small group of mostly old men and women who marched behind 40-year-old ‘Gays support the miners’ banners from the epochal struggle of 1984-85. They were undoubtedly for the mining community and its struggles.

The other cause of upset was the decision to invite Dr Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ‘ambassador’, to speak. The crowd was absolutely with him and his speech was a heartfelt, well delivered one. But it is the ‘outrage’ that this had nothing to do with the miners, and that international issues were not the stuff of the gala, which really rattled me. We joined the International Brigades to fight fascism in Spain. We supported Irish republicans during numerous struggles for freedom. Galas were wracked by heckling and propaganda around the Vietnam War. Our opposition to the Gulf War was significant and Cuban ambassadors or miners from Asturias have long been features of the gala. Or just read the banners for god’s sake. At least three - Chopwell, Bewick Main and Follonsby - have VI Lenin on them, as well as variously Marx and James Connolly, while Hatfield Main has Rosa Luxemburg.

Likewise, there is the charge that there are no miners there any more, so it’s not a miners’ gala. I confess that I’ve expressed fears that the TUC will take it over and sanitise it - Tolpuddle it, regiment it, make it all PC - but that hasn’t happened yet: it is still very much the miners’ day, and I meet up with hundreds of my old comrades and friends and their families. The old democracy of the DMA is gone, speakers are no longer selected by vox pop among the lodges, and some questionable decisions are being made with regard to who and what can be paraded. Like anti-coal, anti-fossil fuels groups, such as Friends of the Earth and Extinction Rebellion, marching with their banners, while I’m told the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) were told they couldn’t display photos of Stalin. Not my pin-up, but who decides?

Turning to this year’s gala itself, the sun blazed down - in contrast to last year’s torrential rain. Bare-chested young men marched like their fathers had in 1984, while sun tops and shorts were the common feature for the host of young lasses. Meanwhile, old ‘Gamgees’ like me still wore our traditional black with pocket-watched waistcoats. We couldn’t get a consensus on numbers, but there were obviously more than in the drenching rain of last year. About half of what we used to have, I thought, while others thought it was about the same as usual at 150,000-200,000.

The speakers were union leaders Sharon Graham (Unite), Matt Wrack (NASUWT), Eddie Dempsey (RMT), plus Jeremy Corbyn MP, Chris Peace from Orgreave Truth and Justice, and, as I’ve said, Palestine’s ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot.

Alan Mardghum set the pace and the tone for the whole platform, his voice boiling with anger - anger at this government, anger at the rise of Reform in our heartlands (but he was very clear in not condemning the voters of Durham, who remain ‘our people’ - good people). He railed against the slaughter of the innocents in Gaza and the vile nature of the Israeli state. Like many former socialist members of the Labour Party, he has been kicked out. But he tells me personally he still thinks Labour has a chance if it ditches Starmer and his Tory policies.

Corbyn, true to form, does not get rattled, is not given to public anger, and spoke in a quiet, measured tone. He gave nothing away about any possible new party - or the need for one.

Sharon Graham made what I believe was the speech of her life - and very much more my way of thinking. She has had it with Labour and, by extension, any rebrand. She strikes a much bolder syndicalist stance these days - withdrawing membership from Angela Rayner and hinting that the whole bankrolling of the corrupt Labour Party is about to end; that the workers’ movement itself is better placed to elaborate our demands and action strategies to obtain them. She strained her voice to breaking point in a passionate condemnation of the capitalist system and the whole political superstructure which supports it. The whole thing gives the lie to the very notion that ‘unions aren’t political’ or that political consciousness can’t develop from those unions. The event itself, the nature of the debate - on the platform and among the crowd, in the crammed pubs later - was intensely political, as it is and will be in the unions themselves.

I was first taken to the gala as a bairn in a carrycot, and later went with friends as a teenager. Now I get there in a motorised wheelchair at the age of 77. I’ve changed, life and work has changed and we all have changed, but it’s still in essence the miner’s gala.

See you there next year!.