Durham Miners Gala: Applause and abuse

The event showed working class solidarity—but also the rising tensions in a Reform-supporting County

~ Tom Brown ~

It was an early start for Durham Miners’ Gala, these islands’ largest gathering of the working class. The event had well over 100 thousand participants. I marched with Teesside Radical Bookfair collective and we joined the Palestine Bloc with our union, the Industrial Workers of the World.

We were told that the police had been hassling the Palestine Bloc, with one caution for wearing a T-shirt that allegedly may have implied support for Palestine Action. I’ve never heard of the police trying to hassle marchers at the Gala before; they don’t usually have the confidence to cause trouble at an event of this scale, where a lot of people there remember the Battle of Orgreave in 1984 and the state of siege that the police put their villages under in that period.

Many people outside the pubs watching the march applauded us, but there were a lot of people shouting abuse as well. One guy who shouted “EDL” and another, who complained to the police about us, was wearing a Reform t-shirt and holding an Israel flag as he did a Nazi salute.

While the Gala is about working class solidarity, it is also a gathering of the people of County Durham, who recently elected a Reform-led council. As we entered the field, Alan Mardghum, secretary of the DMA, was calling the leader of the council a “Keyboard warrior” and inviting him to repeat the personal insults and lies had recently made online to his face. After hanging around the IWW stall for a bit, we listened to the speeches by the Palestinian ambassador, the first Palestinian to address the Big Meeting (better late then never I guess), and Jeremy Corbyn, who disappointed electoralist socialists by not announcing a new party.

We went to a music festival in Chopwell after that. Known as Little Moscow, the streets were decorated with red flags as part of their Centenary of the Chopwell Lockout commemorations. Laurie Shepherd sung a beautiful song about the Suffragettes, punk band AKKAT ATTAK started their set by claiming, incorrectly, that “We are fucking shit!”, the Whippet Beans, OPEN, and a lot of other bands had a lot of people dancing a lot. It was an intense and brilliant day.

Photos: Andy Bick, Durham Miners’ Gala, Football Lads and Lasses Against Fascism, Tom Brown

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