When the Pit and the Parade Marched as One

How a bucket collection at 1984 Pride turned into the alliance that just saved Durham Pride

Pride (movie), 2014

In June 1984, two men stood on the route of the London Pride march holding collection buckets for striking coal miners. Mark Ashton was a 22-year-old member of the Young Communist League. Mike Jackson worked at a print shop. Neither had any connection to the coalfields. What they had was a instinct that the National Union of Mineworkers, then four months into a strike against pit closures, was fighting the same government that was making their own lives harder — and that gay men and lesbians, who understood what it meant to be a target of the state, owed the miners solidarity rather than sympathy from a distance.

That instinct became Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, founded weeks later at a meeting above Gay’s the Word bookshop in Bloomsbury. Eleven people showed up to that first meeting. By the time the strike ended in March 1985, more than sixty were involved in London alone, and sister groups had formed in Manchester, Brighton, Southampton, Glasgow, Dublin and beyond.

Forty pence a week, one valley at a time

LGSM chose to direct its fundraising to a single community rather than scatter it across the coalfield: the Neath, Dulais and Swansea Valley area of South Wales. It was not an obvious match. Some LGSM members had grown up in mining towns and left because of the homophobia they found there, and they were nervous about how they’d be received in Onllwyn. The worry didn’t survive first contact — Jackson later described the welcome as feeling like coming home.

Over the following months, the group shook buckets outside gay bars and clubs, ran jumble sales, and staged the fundraiser that became LGSM’s calling card: Pits and Perverts, a benefit gig at Camden’s Electric Ballroom on 10 December 1984, headlined by Bronski Beat and attended by roughly 1,500 people. It raised £5,650 in a single night. Miners’ wives and delegations from Dulais travelled to London and were hosted in gay households; LGSM members made the return trip to Wales, ending up dancing at the Onllwyn Miners’ Welfare Hall. By the strike’s end, the London group alone had raised around £22,500 — close to £70,000 today — covering roughly a quarter of the Dulais support group’s costs, according to the LGSM archive.

The miners paid it back

The strike was defeated in March 1985. What didn’t end was the relationship, and what followed mattered as much as the fundraising itself. At the October 1984 Labour Party conference, the NUM had already sent a message of solidarity to the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights, promising that “our struggle is yours,” according to the Bishopsgate Institute archive. The following June, miners from South Wales marched at the head of London Pride alongside LGSM — the first time the march had opened its ranks to a straight contingent.

Then, at the 1985 Labour conference in Bournemouth, delegates voted on a resolution committing the party to LGBT equality — a motion that had failed before and that the party’s national executive still opposed. It passed, and by most accounts of the vote it passed specifically because the NUM’s block vote carried it, a fact confirmed independently by Wikipedia’s sourced account and by the Bishopsgate archive. Three years later, when the Thatcher government introduced Section 28 to bar the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools, NUM branches were again among the loudest trade union voices campaigning against it.

None of this was inevitable. It was the direct, traceable consequence of two men with collection buckets deciding that a strike four hundred miles away was their fight too.

Reform UK cuts the cheque, forty years on

Durham Pride began in 2014 and grew steadily for a decade, drawing an estimated 20,000 people by 2023. It relied partly on Durham County Council funding — a few thousand pounds a year plus a one-off boost from the city’s bid to become UK City of Culture.

That changed after Reform UK won control of Durham County Council in 2025. Deputy council leader Darren Grimes, who is gay, announced that Pride “won’t be getting a single penny from this council next year,” arguing the event had “stopped being a celebration of gay rights a long time ago” and had become what he called a platform for “gender ideology and political activism.” Council funds, he said, should go to bins, roads and core services instead. Around the same time, Reform-controlled councils nationally were barred from flying rainbow flags on council buildings, and Durham’s own flag came down from the castle.

The rhetoric will sound familiar to anyone following LGBTQ+ politics on either side of the Atlantic. “Gender ideology” has become the preferred term for a wider push, visible in Reform’s platform in the UK and in the Trump administration’s policy agenda in the US, to recast Pride events, trans healthcare and school curricula as ideological overreach rather than civil rights questions — the same administration that this year moved to end a dedicated LGBTQ+ crisis line for young people. Durham’s funding cut was small in cash terms. As a signal, it read the same way defunding always does: as a test of how much resistance the move would meet.

The Durham Miners Association picks up the buckets

It didn’t take long to find out. Stephen Guy, chairman of the Durham Miners Association (DMA), argued publicly that the union movement owed Durham Pride the same solidarity LGSM had once shown the coalfield, and the DMA began organising alongside the TUC and the performers’ union Equity to close the funding gap. Part of that campaign was a screening of the 2014 film Pride, which dramatises the LGSM story, with Mike Jackson himself — now in his seventies and still active in labour and LGBTQ+ organising — appearing on the panel afterward.

By the time Durham Pride’s 2026 parade stepped off from Palace Green on 30 May, unions had raised more than £15,000, exceeding the roughly £10,000 the council had withdrawn. Equity alone donated £7,200 and signed a first-of-its-kind agreement with Durham Pride setting minimum pay and conditions for performers at the event, according to PinkNews. City of Durham MP Mary Kelly Foy said the attempt at “political grandstanding” had backfired.

Seven weeks later, at the 139th Durham Miners’ Gala — the region’s enormous annual trade union march, marking the 41st anniversary of the 1984–85 strike — Durham Pride and LGBTQ+ groups were given their own designated section of the parade for the first time in the Gala’s history, marching behind a banner reading “We are still here.” Mel Metcalf, chair of Durham Pride and the son and grandson of miners, called it, in his words, simply “fabulous.”

What the timeline actually shows

Year	Event
June 1984	Ashton and Jackson collect for striking miners at London Pride; LGSM founded weeks later
Dec 1984	Pits and Perverts benefit at the Electric Ballroom raises £5,650
Mar 1985	Miners’ strike ends; LGSM has raised roughly £22,500 for Dulais Valley families
Jun 1985	NUM and South Wales miners lead London Pride alongside LGSM
Oct 1985	Labour Party conference passes an LGBT equality resolution, carried by the NUM’s block vote
1988	NUM campaigns against Section 28
2025	Reform UK takes control of Durham County Council, cuts Durham Pride funding
May 2026	Trade unions, led by the DMA, raise over £15,000 to cover the shortfall; Durham Pride goes ahead
Jul 2026	Durham Pride marches as its own section of the Durham Miners’ Gala for the first time

Why this is bigger than one council budget line

It would be easy to file the Durham story under “nice historical bookend” and move on. That undersells what actually happened. A local Reform administration used the same script now common to the populist right on both sides of the Atlantic — reframe Pride as ideology rather than identity, strip the funding, remove the flag, wait for the story to die down — and it didn’t work, because a labour institution with a forty-year memory decided the debt was still owed. The DMA didn’t step in because Pride was popular or profitable. It stepped in because in 1984, a handful of strangers with collection buckets treated the coalfield’s fight as their own, and the miners never forgot it.

That is the actual lesson for anyone watching “gender ideology” rhetoric spread through council chambers, statehouses and, this year, US federal agencies: defunding a Pride parade is cheap and reversible. Dismantling forty years of built solidarity is much harder, and in Durham, it didn’t happen at all.