The 136th Durham Miners’ Gala was due to take place tomorrow. Although disappointed, we can all understand why, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the event cannot go ahead in its traditional form.

I attended the Gala last year, and was honoured to march with the new banner through the village of Horden. The Gala has long been referred to as ‘The Big Meeting’. Bands march towards Durham, where the marketplace in the city centre forms the main assembly point. The procession later converges at the County Hotel at Old Elvet, where union leaders, invited guests and local dignitaries greet the march from the hotel balcony and the bands pause to play.

From there, people march to the racecourse, where banners are strapped to the fences and, at 1pm, the platform party arrives and the chairman opens the meeting. After the speeches, selected bands and banners march to the cathedral for the miners’ service.

As a proud member and former chair of the Friends of the Durham Miners’ Gala my affections for and roots in the Big Meeting run deep. It is the largest working-class gathering in Europe. My father, grandfathers, uncles and cousins all spent their working lives in the mining industry. The values of social solidarity, unity and collective struggle that the Gala represents are as important today as they have ever been.

The current pandemic has demonstrated the role those values play in stitching together the social fabric – and reminded us all of the importance of both workers and trade unions. It has been working people, not the wealthy, whose labour has kept this country going through this historic crisis. And it has been trade unions, fighting to protect workers and defend jobs, who have protected communities from the worst of the fallout.

In the former mining communities of this country, those traditions ran through the coal seams. A labour movement which fought for generations of workers not only improved lives, created common identities and built great social institutions like the Gala – it pointed the way to a fundamentally better world, one in which working people might have power over their own lives.

The joys and sadness of the collective struggle are very much part of the Gala tradition. Memories of lives lost in my own constituency include the Easington colliery disaster in May 1951, which resulted in the deaths of eighty-three miners, and more distant memories of the 164 men and boys killed in the Seaham Colliery explosion in 1880. At this time of year, these tragedies are reflected upon – and they should not be forgotten.

Peak production of coal in Britain was back in 1913, when 165,247 men and boys working in county Durham’s pits produced a staggering 58.7 million tons of coal. Historically, coal was a rich mineral resource in Durham and was mined in substantial quantities as far back as medieval times. The industrial revolution, however, led to a huge expansion in domestic demand and new techniques allowed the miners to reach deeper and more productive seams.

From the latter part of the eighteen century the principal landowners of the county, including the Bishop of Durham, amassed immense wealth from their colliery holdings. In the nineteenth century, the growth of the mining industry was to transform the landscape and population of county Durham. Colliery villages sprang up almost everywhere where coal was found, and migrant workers from all parts of the UK and Ireland swelled the workforce.

The coal industry and the men who worked in it contributed to many social advances, from trades unionism to public healthcare, housing, welfare, health and safety at work, as well as the foundation of the Labour Party. Labour politicians, including the leader, speaking to the crowds at the Gala with passion from the speakers’ podium was a prominent feature of the Big Meeting. I am so proud that this is tradition was revived by our last leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and many members of his shadow cabinet in the past five years. 

The sound of the magnificent brass and pipe bands – and the colour of the miners’ banners as the crowds march over the Old Elvet Bridge, past the County Hotel to the racecourse – is truly an assault on the senses. Embodied in the banners is the rich tapestry of the social history of mining communities, and the sons and daughters of those towns parade them with enormous pride.

Coal miners like my father and grandfathers toiled long and hard in the bowels of the earth in dangerous conditions to provide the fuel that powered the revolution which made Britain Great. The nation owes its former mining communities an enormous debt of honour, one which is too often forgotten by politicians – not least in the sense of injustice that still burns from successive governments taking billions of pounds in surpluses generated by the mineworkers’ pension funds, money that would otherwise have gone to retired miners and their widows.

Former coalfield communities live with the industrial legacy of the mining industry. The legacy of ill health has seen lives cut short from industrial disease. Nearly thirty years after the closure of the last pit in the Easington constituency which I represent, the prevalence of the respiratory disease, COPD, is twice the national average. Today, if our coalfield communities were a single distinct region, it would be the most impoverished region in the UK.

Even during times of relative economic prosperity, job creation in coalfield communities is only half that of the leading regional centres and just a third of the rate we see in London. Over the past three decades, the economic divide has widened at an alarming rate. There are no magic bullets, but the issues of deindustrialisation and market failure can never be resolved while we lack investment and the political will of central government in Westminster and Whitehall.

The mining infrastructure and pit wheels that once loomed over our collieries have gone. All we have left is the colliery rows that once housed miners and their families. However, these homes, like our industry, have been left to the mercy of the private sector and market failure. Homes once managed by the National Coal Board or local authority are now in the hands of absentee private landlords who take advantage of extremely low property prices to turn a quick profit.

This often means that vulnerable residents live in sub-standard houses, with anti-social behaviour, crime and dereliction blighting their outlook of a brighter future. Many feel that their once proud communities are no longer a safe place to raise a family, and some are voting with their feet. County Durham was once the exclusive preserve of Labour MPs – now the party has a fight on its hands to rebuild the trust and loyalty the of these communities.

That is why the Durham Miners’ Gala is so crucially important to the future of our movement. It stands as a reminder of the struggles that built the trades unions and the Labour Party, and of the values that they were created to represent. But it is more than a celebration of North-East heritage, or an exercise in nostalgia. It is a celebration of workers coming together to demand their rights. The actions of the miners demonstrated the power that a unified workforce can have in bringing about political change.

While the Gala will not take place in its usual form this year, the Durham Miners’ Association have organised an online celebration which I strongly encourage readers of Tribune to take part in.

The live event, ‘The Second Saturday in July’, will be hosted from Redhills, the home of the Association, by its Secretary Alan Mardghum. It will feature new videos and archive footage from the Gala’s long history, as well as brass band music, messages from frontline workers and addresses from leading figures in the labour movement. The event will stream live on Facebook from 1pm tomorrow.

I would also like to encourage those who can to consider supporting the Gala by becoming a ‘Marra’. For more than a century, the Gala was funded by the working miners of the Durham coalfield. Today, with the closure of the last of the working coal mines, it is up to us to continue this great tradition.