We're Back

Arriving in a blazingly sunny Durham for the first Miners' Gala since 2019, and the biggest since the Strike, the first thing that I heard was a brass band playing I Predict a Riot. I was soon marching in with the RMT. Who says that there is no Opposition?

Certainly not the Leader of the Opposition, Mick Lynch, whom at least 200,000 people gave a rock star reception before he delivered one of the day's several barnstorming speeches, all of them by trade union leaders or frontline workers, and all of them expressing profound scepticism about party politics at least in anything like its current form.

The booing of the very name of the absent Keir Starmer was a joy almost beyond words. There is nothing wrong with going to the Royal Box at Wimbledon. Given the opportunity, who would not? But when the 1970s trade union leaders used to go to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot in full kit and caboodle, then they were also doing their day jobs.

To the couple who asked Tototai Mativavarira and me to autograph their Gala programmes, and who were so delighted to have met us "at last", Dave and Sue, we love you, too. No, they had not mistaken our identities. They entreated us by name. To the little girl who asked whether I was the Prime Minister, no, and like everyone else I no longer have any idea who is at any given time. But bless you for being one of the many, many admirers of my beautiful suit.

Including Daniel Kebede, at whose specific request I hereby endorse him for General Secretary of the National Education Union. He clearly does not regard being promoted on here as toxic, so Lanchester is pleased to look after its own. As Dr Jo Grady of the UCU said in her speech, those who fully understand the power of education fear an educated working class, and are therefore destroying arts and humanities degree courses across England.

I am no faux prole. My father was born into the working class in Scotland 100 years ago this month, while my mother's ancestors included all three of African slaves, Indian indentured labourers, and Chinese coolies. Enclosure was financed by the slave trade, so there has always been one struggle, and it will always be my struggle.

As part of a new partnership with the Notting Hill Carnival, which saw the Mangrove Steelband here and will presumably see pit village brass bands there, a rapturous reception was given to Yvette Williams of Justice4Grenfell. She looked at the vast crowd and wowed it with the observation that, "There are so many more of us than there are of them." There was also loud applause at this, the Hajj of the white working class, for Dr Patrick Roach of NASUWT when he commended "taking the knee to declare that Black Lives Matter".

Alan Mardghum of the Durham Miners' Association not only demanded justice for Orgreave in no uncertain terms, but also dared to mention the looting of the Mineworkers' Pension Scheme, which had been a taboo subject at the Big Meeting in recent years. The only MPs on the platform were Jeremy Corbyn and Barry Gardiner, neither of whom gave a speech, although the crowd sang Oh, Jeremy Corbyn so loudly and for so long at the very end that Corbyn did come to the microphone to say the one word, "Solidarity."

The talk of the field and the watering holes was like the talk of the platform, about retaining party membership, Labour or otherwise, if you must, but in practice concentrating heavily on trade union and wider campaigning work, and on unifying the two, the unions and wider activism, with a particular emphasis that every worker should be an active trade union member and that industrial action should be coordinated across the Movement. 

Offstage, there was unanimity that the Parliamentary Labour Party would never have allowed a Corbyn Government to have been formed. There was the resigned, matter-of-fact observation that Boris Johnson had got from treacherous Conservative MPs what Corbyn had got from treacherous Labour ones. There was derision of Starmer's having been let off over his beer and curry as his predictable reward for scabbing.

And there was vociferous opposition to the Green agenda. Some tried, but this was hardly a day for those who would have celebrated the defeat of the miners as somehow to the greater good. Rather, this was a day for those who would harness the power of the State to deliver energy from every available source. In Brother Lynch's rousing words, "We're back. The working class is back. We refuse to be meek, we refuse to be humble, and we refuse to be poor anymore."