This is the third year that we at Newcastle United Fans Foodbank have held a stall at The Trade Tent at Durham Big Meeting, as our family still calls it. Others know it as Durham Miners Gala and really the identities are interchangeable and both full of meaning. It’s fair to say that it still occupies a legendary place at the heart of its regional coalfield and the national trade union community.
“What the Durham miners said”
If you go there at 8.30am and stand outside the County Hotel and watch the colliery bands marching down the hill and over the bridge into Old Elvet with their banners held aloft, the deep brass volume and the rhythm of the drums, you can feel the power of what our movement once was. It still is, or still feels like “our movement”; my mam remembers being there in 1947 and I played under the stage with the prime minister on it in 1976, and it once had enough power once to decide national policy as “what the Durham miners said” was listened to in Westminster. In recent years it has reinvented itself as a celebration of trade union celebratory solidarity. The “Solidarity Forever” theme, with t-shirts and posters designed by our friend Theresa Easton who has helped many and been at the centre of artistic community engagement for years.
The Gala has to change a bit
Then again, as I left the racecourse field helping John move the remnants of our stall up the hill, past the Court, over the bridge and up another bloody hill to where he was staying in The Castle, we wondered whether we would be back next year. I confess that I have my doubts and I’m sorry to mention them and hope I’m wrong, but I think the Gala has to change a bit.
Maybe it’s just me, and it may well be, so I’ll start with the good bits and just because I’ve been running gigs since I was a kid, maybe I’m hyper-sensitive to potential flash points of unhappy humanity and, again I hope that I’m wrong. For example, I didn’t hear any of the speeches, I was working our stall and all I could hear was the waltzer, but I heard Matt Wrack was good and I spoke to Dan Kebede on the Friday night and wished him my best. Also, last Saturday’s awful cold and wet weather didn’t help and despite the rain, the spirit of the event still had the usual smiles and the good people who’d travelled distances to get there to be inspired by friendly humanity and have a laugh.
We made some great connections with the anti-sweatshop t-shirt company “No Sweat”, met two great people from Filia, renewed friendships with the International Brigade stall, the fellers from Barnsley t-shirt stand, Show Racism the Red Card, Newcastle University and Hassockfield Resistance and were happy to be next door to Orgreave and others who are doing their best to raise awareness and some funds to continue their campaigns. We had our new “Fans Supporting Foodbanks” T-Shirts for sale and were giving away NUFC Fans Foodbank stickers and national team wristbands and flags courtesy of our friend Ash Vedhara, as we thanked our lucky stars that this easy distribution to happy kids and families “for the bairns” was facilitated by England still being in the tournament for the next 36 hours anyway.
But there were issues that seem too obvious to be ignored.
Tea
Don’t laugh, but there was no tea tent. You get up too early for breakfast, walk across a city and a field and you think that 9am is too early to start boozing so you want a cup of tea. I went to see Durham Labour Party, who usually run a big tea tent and they said they weren’t doing it as “they made a loss last year” (when it was hot and sunny). I contend that any event like this should have a tent to allow people, old and young to sit down in and get a cup of tea and perhaps a sandwich and cake. Maybe I didn’t look in the pavilion, but had to fork out £9 for tea and burger at a van. It was just about ok and I hope they paid a lot for their pitch to Marras, but if the Labour Party can’t even do a tea tent, maybe they should get the experts, The Conservative Party in? That’s their level these days. But there should be tea. It’s not trivial, my gran would expect it and it lets people converse and be friends.
Trotsky and Stalin
Unbelievably, and I still can’t believe that I saw this, these two killers were represented by various political organisations that faced each other in stalls across the field, like a re-enactment party for obscure generational hatreds that won’t disappear. There was a large picture of Stalin in one of the Communist Party organisations stalls, who seemed spectacularly ignorant of his life and actions, and copies of Trotsky’s books in honoured places on the tables of respectable books shops elsewhere. Apart from the offence that could be given to anyone who’s family suffered repression, collectivisation, torture, famine and the destruction of hope that these two are equally responsible for, why does anyone think anyone needs to hear anything political from these two liars and killers?
The Durham pit community symbolises progress, generosity, solidarity, love and dignity. They epitomise humanity and need no lessons from these murderers, never did and never will. If political diversity allows the right of free speech then the stag party from Sunderland who sang “God Save the King” next to the anti-monarchist stall in a vaguely aggressive fashion, and even the racist scumbag who told me that he was wearing (rather he was disgracing) a large Star of David on his jacket because “he wasn’t Jewish, but hated Muslims” have to be tolerated too.
Performative pantomime politics may have a place somewhere but this was an undignified ignorant disgrace. A pamphlet was available that contended Stalin didn’t order the Khatyn Massacre (he signed the order and his Kremlin executioner Vasily Blokhin shot the thousands) that would disgrace any event and can only be regarded in the same category as atrocities of propaganda as “The Protocols of Zion” or “Did Six Million Really Die?”. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this. If you tolerate this then don’t object to people dressed up as SS killers in “military re-enactment” events. I do and I will.
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The Labour Party
The above might explain the absence of Labour politicians at senior level before and since Jeremy Corbyn played the role of leader. He played the bodhran badly in my dad’s band in 2016 in The County Hotel and he was there in 2024 getting photos taken. Why won’t Keir come to Durham? Because one photograph next to the five feet high colour poster of Karl Marx (great historian but a terrible man who inspired movements of death and got the servant his wife funded pregnant.) would annihilate years of careful campaigning, and delight Mr Hitchens claims that he’s a closet Pabloite. Imagine the fuss we’d make of a photo of a Tory Minister standing next to a Mussolini bust and even they would probably have to resign (well maybe).
One of the weirdest things about the day was that Labour had won a landslide majority just eight days before, ending 14 years of Conservative/Liberal Democrat occupation, and there was little sense of celebration, jubilation or even a quiet sense of the country feeling better about itself. That feeling of positivity was discernible in a Tyne Valley Garden Centre in a previously solid generational Conservative seat the previous Sunday, but not here in reputedly the biggest trade union gathering in the country.
The protesters were still protesting, the flags were waving and the fine delineations of dialectic discussed, but no one in power was listening. Maybe one day a Labour prime minister will speak from the platform to announce the ending of anti trade union legislation, the inclusion of unions on trade missions abroad alongside the corporates, academics, musicians and footballers to advocate a decent society based on prosperity and humanity. However that requires a level of responsibility that currently evades the organisers and the Durham Miners Association. There are only seven million members of trade unions out of a working population four times that, of them maybe 10% vote in union elections and far fewer are active and that situation needs to improve radically. Maybe it’s time to change?
Durham
I hate criticising the Gala. It’s something that I can only justify because I hope I’m wrong and that I hope it can be so much better for the whole community. However, I can have a pop at Durham no bother. That cathedral and castle with its Hogwarts hothoused university of snobbery symbolise the Norman authority of church and state that trade unions should be challenging with vigour and imagination. Where is the economic research spin off job creation of the university? Where are its star academics? Where are its thousands of local working class undergraduates?
I know that there’s a parade and a service and the bishop is probably ok and that people enjoy themselves, but the statue of Lord Londonderry (spit) is still on his horse in the market and the feeling is that The Big Meeting is allowed to exist as part of a nod to nostalgia because it is absolutely no threat whatsoever to the bits of Durham that the ruling class know and all the pathetic waving of fake revolutionary credentials, and the pictures of Bolshevik killers doesn’t frighten the bourgeoisie; it just delights them in revealing the stupidity of the perpetrators.
Will I be there next year? I hope so, but I might avail myself of the opportunity of not working a stall so I can hear the speeches, have a go on the dodgems, campaign for a tea tent, and barrack anyone waving Bolshevik propaganda pretending that they implemented bread peace and land, and those who have the nerve to sell fake history and disgrace our people. The union saying that “The past we inherit, the future we build” is repeated all over at Durham, but it reminds me of “The Likely Lad’s” lyrics that “The only thing we have to look forward too is the past.”
The first thing that needs to be done is to judge the past through a proper historical analysis and start a campaigning movement that places the Labour Party and its trade union founders at the centre of a better economic and social future. Boot out the Trotskys and the Stalins and get a tea tent and you might get the red flag flying over Durham Castle celebrating the technical genius of its thousands of people’s graduates who will earn fair terms and conditions in a better society in a commonwealth of dignity.
Until this is done it’s going to fail the mass of the workers and all of those who need a better government enacting fairer laws. What’s worse is that it will become a revivalist “1920s Reloaded Weekend” for those who wish to discover their radical youth. If it carries on like this, you might as well move it to Butlins.
