Forty years ago, coal miners in the United Kingdom called a nationwide strike to defend their jobs against the Thatcher government’s threat of pit closures and privatization. In a long and difficult struggle, the miners deployed radical picketing tactics to remind the Conservative government that it would not be business as usual – halting the transportation of coal at high volume plants, mobilizing 140,000 miners to stand up to oppressive anti-strike legislation and fighting state-sanctioned police violence in a historic showdown coined as the Battle of Orgreave. Then in a cynical effort to undermine the power of the National Union of Mineworkers, union funds were seized, making it almost impossible for supporters to help miners and their families.
Almost.
Ten years ago Matthew Warchus’s film, Pride was released. It tells the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), a grassroots organization that began to fundraise for striking miners and their families at queer hangouts in London. This isn’t a story where gays save the day, ultimately the miners’ strike ends in defeat, but Pride showcases the emergence of a lasting solidarity between two different and seemingly unlikely groups. Mark Ashton, a gay communist activist, leads the charge with his friends to politicize young gay and lesbian people around their connections to the working-class struggle, growing the LGSM campaign to 11 chapters across the UK.
LGSM’s campaign wasn’t met with immediate appreciation by all queer folks nor by the miners, and this is why the story of LGSM offers lasting lessons in the importance of building solidarity.
At first, LGSM struggled to find a mining community to pair with that was prepared to recognize and respect their support publicly. Dai Donovan from Dulais, a Welsh mining village, recounts that upon meeting Ashton and LGSM co-founder Mike Jackson, he was taken by how similar their politics and struggles were. He later shared in a speech at a London Pride event after the strike ended: “It won’t change overnight, but now a hundred and forty thousand miners know… about blacks and gays and nuclear disarmament and we will never be the same.”
At the time, the British press had been using similar narrative tactics both to sway public opinion against the rights and freedoms of queer people and to turn people against the rights of miners to strike. Just as queer and trans people had been attacked by police, striking miners were met with brutal police repression. These parallels were drawn in other social justice movements to create solidarity, most notably in the Civil Rights’ movement across the Black community, and the women’s rights movement.
Queer community members were still hesitant, however, often wondering, if the tables were turned, whether miners would support them.
In response, Ashton said, ”What do you mean the miners don’t support us? The miners dig coal, which is used for fuel, which makes electricity, that runs these disco lights. Would you go down there and do that? Part of the reason I support them is they go down and do it. I wouldn’t.”
LGSM members applied more pressure from their community fundraising at local pubs. Local drag queen Lily Savage, a vocal supporter of the miners, would take the collection bucket on stage with her and wouldn’t let anyone leave the pub until they donated.
The efforts of the LGSM led to a lasting relationship with the miners that was a catalyst in bringing the gay rights movement to the wider public and pushing the Labor Party to include a motion backing gay rights on their agenda. The National Union of Mineworkers brought along more unions with them, winning the first gay rights motion in 1985 at the Labor Party by 600,000 votes. The unions then got to work immediately by including and developing LGBT+ rights in, for example, equal opportunities policies which they were negotiating with employers. It was to be another fifteen years before LGBT+ rights were enshrined in law by a Labour government, but much of that legislation was based on the work that the unions had already developed.
Pride holds key lessons for socialists looking to build working class power across movements for justice and liberation today. This June, for the 10th anniversary of the film and the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike, Spring’s Toronto chapter, in partnership with the Canadian Labour International Film Festival, will be holding a screening of Pride followed by a virtual Q&A with Mike Jackson from LGSM.
Spring Magazine asked Mike Jackson, LGSM co-founder, a few questions ahead of the event.
What was it like to see yourself and the organization you helped to start portrayed on film?
Mike Jackson: We’ve been very fortunate to have our story immortalized in film because there was a real danger that it would just have been lost or diminished. We knew that what we had achieved was way beyond our expectations — and I archived all the material, but that archive gathered dust between 1987 and 2011. It was scriptwriter Stephen Beresford who walked into our lives determined to tell our story to the world. He wanted it to be a movie, not a documentary, because a movie would have a global reach.
How has LGSM’s legacy lived on in Britain and beyond over the last 40 years?
Mike Jackson: Since the movie was released, our story has been told all over the world and there are countless interviews and videos of us speaking to it, where we have had the opportunity to reinforce the utter importance of unionism and solidarity. Political parties can wax and wane, as the British Labour Party is doing presently, but unions remain the core of mutual support, equality and strength for millions of people across the world in facing up to corporate greed and bullying.
What lessons do you hope that filmgoers here in Toronto will draw from the story of LGSM that might be relevant to working class struggles today?
Mike Jackson: That there are more things that we have in common than those things which might divide us. That we have to reach out to everyone across the planet in offering our support and solidarity. We must see the toxicity of anything that divides us such as war, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism – all of these things we must always be working on and challenging both within ourselves and externally, politically. We must be internationalist in our understanding, just as capitalism is operating and controlling us and our nation states globally.
We have fantastic tools to allow us to do this with relative ease: the internet, videos, AI for translation services, mobile phones. The climate crisis is the new-kid-on-the-block (for us older generation anyway), making everything critically more urgent than ever yet with this crisis too it is capitalism which is the enemy, with its incessant need for growth. We have a world to win and nothing to lose but our chains, and cheap fried chicken stores.
Get your tickets here for Spring and CLIFF’s screening of Pride on June 14th, 7:00pm at Innis Town Hall — and bring along your questions for Mike Jackson!
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