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CHAPTER 1

Chapter for the 21 Century: Over The Rainbow Revisited

So much has changed in the UK and many other countries since I wrote Over the Rainbow: Money, Class and Homophobia (OTR). We have many more legal and institutional rights, a high level of positive media visibility, and the extraordinary and mixed blessing of same-sex marriage. The movement is much more inclusive. None of this seemed very possible or likely in the mid-1990s, so it would be reasonable to ask how the book might be relevant for the LGBT+ movement today. The answer readers have given me is that, in the brutal age of austerity and war, OTR's appraisal of why there are splits and divisions in the movement, its critique of commercialisation of Pride marches and of identity politics, its analysis of the economic roots of LGBT+ oppression, and its call for resistance on the basis of working-class solidarity, are needed now more than ever. I am grateful to have the opportunity, in this introduction, to revisit the themes of the book, explore how it came to be written and describe the catalyst for its republication now in 2016. It is my hope that the book will resonate with those who want to uproot LGBT+ oppression rather than continue to simply grapple with it, and who are open to looking beyond the 'community' for the power to really change the world.

OTR contains an early account of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), which I wrote without even acknowledging that I had been one of the group. It just didn't seem important at the time because the story of LGSM was little known, and my priority in 1994 was to critique attempts to build a unified political LGBT+ movement on the basis of a 'community' of shared sexual identity. I interviewed a number of gay businesspeople, showing how their interest in making profits and commercialising the movement meant they had very little in common with the majority of LGBT+ people. OTR tackled the way people thought about how to fight LGBT+ oppression in the 1990s, and used the story of LGSM to illustrate where the real power to build a new society lies. This story was virtually unknown until 2014. Then, thanks to the persistence and imagination of screenwriter Stephen Beresford, the powerful feature film Pride revealed the story to an unsuspecting worldwide audience. Today, I am able to write about how we may learn from LGSM and the politics of the 1980s by looking beyond the story told in that film, to reflect more deeply than I did in 1994 on the contradictory effect of the strike on the course of our history.

The Pride Effect

Anyone who has seen the film Pride knows about a historic day in June 1985 when coalminers from the Dulais valley in South Wales joined the Lesbian and Gay Pride parade in London, UK. The miners and their families were returning the solidarity and support they had received from London-based LGBT+ activists during their monumental 1984-85 industrial strike against the Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher's administration had hatched a secret plan to destroy the coal industry in Britain and cow the organised working class by crushing – with brute force – the country's most powerful and organised trade union: the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The miners, led by union president Arthur Scargill, responded to the threat of pit closures and mass unemployment by walking out on indefinite strike, without a ballot, and staying out for a whole year, in the face of extreme hardship, police violence and politically motivated media smears. Their courageous action was, and still is, an inspirational, salutary lesson to millions across the world. That joyous contingent on the Pride parade in 1985 was part of a seismic historical shakedown.

As depicted in the film Pride, we marched with our banners –Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and Lesbians Against Pit Closures (LAPC)–from Hyde Park to the South Bank, where we gathered for the Pride party celebrations and to show our exhibition telling the story of LGSM and LAPC through photos, memorabilia and press clippings from the strike. Our exhibition stands were set up alongside the bright red van with a pink triangle on the side, bought for the Dulais Valley community with funds raised by LGSM. We sold solidarity badges, miners' lamps, our 'Pits and Perverts' t-shirts and tickets for our alternative post-Pride party at the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in Cowcross Street. Siân James, a miner's wife who helped establish the Neath and Dulais Valley Support Group during the strike (and later became the first ever woman member of parliament for Swansea East), addressed the crowds that afternoon on a stage set up on the South Bank next to County Hall to rapturous applause. She said it had been the 'best and friendliest' demonstration she had ever been on. Meeting gay people had a profound effect on the people of Dulais, she explained. 'When they first heard you were coming to town, older people in the village wanted to know what they should do. "Just act natural," we said. Now they ask, "When are those lovely people coming down again?"'. She promised that Dulais miners would be there to support gays, just as gays had been there when Dulais needed support.

As Pride relates in its closing sequence, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1985 voted to formally adopt a policy on lesbian and gay rights and, the next year, the Labour Party followed suit. Attempts to get these proposals through had been made many times before, by LGBT+ members of public sector unions and by campaigning Labour Party members. What shifted it this time was the solid backing of the giant NUM , due to its members' experiences of community and class solidarity during the bitter, brave and extraordinary strike.

Striking miners and LGBT+ socialist activists were an unexpected subject for a mainstream movie but this film's warmth, humour and authenticity captured hearts and minds. We are often told that prejudice and ignorance take years, even generations, to break down, as shifts in attitudes take place slowly, rather like the gradual erosion of mountainous rock by wind and rain. The LGSM/LAPC story showed that, in the heat of class struggle, when we need to link arms and unite against the common enemy to defend our lives and our communities, prejudice and preconceptions can come tumbling down.

The response to Pride proved so powerful that the remaining original members of LGSM and LAPC re-formed for a year so that we could respond to the overwhelming number of international requests for speakers to address the tidal wave of enthusiasm. For those former members of LGSM and LAPC who came forward, our experience of the film's impact was a political and personal revelation. The timing was perfect; the film came out exactly thirty years after the strike and so became part of a raft of commemorative political events and initiatives. We witnessed an extraordinary live reaction unfold through screenings in schools, festivals, trade union events, cinemas, universities, community centres and meeting halls in London, New York, Montreal, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Ankara, Istanbul, Warsaw, Moscow, Sydney, Birmingham, Bristol, Dublin, Newcastle and Manchester – to name but a few.

Social media networks sprang up to connect thousands of supporters around the world who wanted to link up to build solidarity, and to get involved in political campaigning in their own countries and communities. LGSM member Mike Jackson got hold of the replica LGSM banner from the Pride art department. We took it on picket lines and demonstrations, making collections and delivering financial solidarity and moral support to strikes and campaigns over austerity, racism, housing, privatisation, the Living Wage and other political/community issues. We reproduced our 'Pits and Perverts' t-shirts and posters, brought out new badges and were disconcerted to find ourselves accosted at merchandise stalls by people who wanted to have their picture taken with us. We raised money and awareness for the Terrence Higgins Trust's Red Ribbon support fund set up in memory of LGSM founder Mark Ashton, who died of HIV/AIDS in 1987, aged 26.

We were also asked by the organisers of Pride in London to lead the parade in 2015. I will return to this later.

It was clear to me, amid the sometimes embarrassing media hype and celebrity fever surrounding LGSM, and from the debates I witnessed around the screenings and meetings, that the enthusiastic and emotional reaction to the film was an expression of a deep political hunger for an effective fightback against present-day oppression and exploitation. To everyone who remembered supporting the strike, and to young people born years after it ended, the story of LGSM offered a new symbol of unity, solidarity and defiance which went far beyond what many in the original group had anticipated. A new generation of young activists were seething with anger at attacks on their lives through conservatism, bigotry and heteronormativity (which in the 1980s we called 'compulsory heterosexuality'). They were facing the housing crisis, soaring rents, tuition fees, abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance, zero-hours contracts, cuts in health and social care, welfare 'reform', racism, Islamophobia, immigration controls, and all the horrors of austerity, racism and imperialism. Pride's story of a community under attack from a bigoted right-wing Tory government, and offering unconditional support to another beleaguered section of society, struck a chord with a new audience. If it could happen in 1984, could it happen now? If a force such as the NUM could be defeated, what did this mean for the future of collective struggle?

For some in the audiences who had experience of collective struggle and activism, in or outside trade unions, there was a feeling that social media and privatisation had lured the younger generations towards individualised and perhaps more passive approaches such as consumer boycotts and petition-signing. Due to the decreased level of strikes in the UK since the 1980s, and the half-hearted attempts of trade union leaders to challenge austerity, many young people in those audiences were questioning whether a strike like the miners' strike would be possible today, and how relevant trade unions are to young workers now. Listening to their heartfelt questions about the best ways to challenge austerity, I realised perhaps more acutely than before, the detrimental effect the defeat of the miners' strike had on working-class confidence. A sense that governments have unlimited power and can do what they like, however much it hurts ordinary people, is the new status quo seeping through the generations; the view that individuals only care about themselves and selfishness is an indelible human characteristic has become normative. I was also struck by a second legacy of the strike's defeat in the various forms of postmodern arguments that go something like this: if the pursuit of profit, regardless of human need, is an inevitable social dynamic, and if mass struggle is now impossible, then the brutality of capitalist economics can only be tackled at the level of personal defiance, individual solutions, the politics of shared identity, and localised community initiatives. In the LGBT+ movement, this often translates into focussing on the creation of 'queer space' or 'safe space' for a perceived LGBT+ 'community'. It's understandable, but it misses the fact that LGBT+ do not all belong to one community, and it won't change the world.

I believe that if we are to rid the world of sexual oppression and LGBT+phobia, we must go further and be much bolder. There is another legacy of the miners' strike to which we can turn. This is the tradition of learning lessons from the past, honestly and unflinchingly, seeing the mistakes made on our own side so that we may avoid the same mistakes again. This tradition makes us fiercer and clearer; it is the key to understanding that in fighting oppression and exploitation we have to be prepared to confront the forces and structure of the state in a revolutionary way. The real story behind Pride is a good place to start on this journey.

No Fairy Tale

Pride created a romantic comedy from LGSM, but it's vital not to romanticise the story or allow it to become a historical curiosity, nostalgia trip, or idealistic fairy tale. For me as a still-active socialist, revisiting the experience of LGSM has been a sharp reminder of how tough life was for LGBT+ people during the Thatcher period, and of the critical importance of the strike then and now.

Pride intimated that the TUC and Labour Party policies on sexuality rights were a direct result of or even 'payback' for the work of LGSM. In truth, a trade union can only change policy if enough members and branches agree. The new policy on lesbian and gay rights at the TUC in 1985 was only possible because of a general political development within the NUM's grassroots across the rural pit communities, along with political radicalisation and awareness of the power of industrial struggle amongst the multicultural and cosmopolitan populations of Britain's cities. South Wales-based NUM activist Dai Donovan (played by Paddy Considine in Pride) addressed a huge audience at LGSM's 'Pits and Perverts' strike fundraiser in Camden's Electric Ballroom in December 1984 , saying:

'You have worn our badge, "Coal Not Dole", and you know what harassment means, as we do. Now we will pin your badge on us, we will support you. It won't change overnight, but now 140,000 miners know that there are other causes and other problems. We know about blacks and gays and nuclear disarmament and we will never be the same ... Victory to the old, victory to the sick, victory to lesbians and gays, and victory to the working class!'

There may have been, as Pride dramatically depicts, homophobic opposition in South Wales to receiving solidarity from a lesbian and gay group. But LGSM experienced no tangible negativity either on the first visit to South Wales, or subsequently. Solidarity for the strike was a two-way process whose trajectory was highly contradictory in light of the eventual outcomes: defeat of the strike, alongside a highly raised level of political awareness and ideas across the British working class. This is a perfect example of the 'dialectic', fundamental to understanding any political situation at any time. It can be summed up as 'every cloud has a silver lining – and vice versa'. The defeat of the strike contained a silver lining of a generalised heightened political engagement and level of awareness of oppression. The strike itself was pure silver, surrounded by dark clouds of Tory intention and the TUC's timidity. So, how did this dual narrative play out?

Pride only obliquely articulated the reason for the strike: to stop mass pit closures, save jobs and preserve communities. An enormous volume of material now exists about the miners' strike and I want to focus here on the links between class struggle and fighting oppression and bigotry. But it's vital to understand that the Tories under Thatcher had dual tactical and ideological purposes in shutting the coal mines. They were determined to weaken the entire trade union movement and to privatise industries like coal, taken into public ownership by previous Labour administrations. Key militant trade union officials and representatives were victimised and sacked to neuter the resistance before the shut-downs and redundancies began. The Tories dismantled nationalised car manufacturing in 1979 and the steel industry in 1980. Civil servants who worked in intelligence at GCHQ were stripped of the right to strike in 1981. Train drivers were forced to accept inhumane shift rotas in 1982, the same year health workers' pay was cut. All those workers fought, demonstrated and struck. The TUC stood by and allowed each union and each group of workers to be beaten. It came as little surprise when the miners were chosen for the next Tory battleground. Sheila McGregor, a socialist activist who helped organise political solidarity during the strike, summarises:

'The miners had defeated the ruling class twice, once in 1972 when their strike drove a coach and horses through the pay policy of the day, and then again in 1974 when Tory prime minister Ted Heath decided to call an election on who should run the country — and lost. The Tories never forgot and never forgave. They wanted to defeat the miners in open battle, so they prepared for a strike. As Thatcher's chancellor Nigel Lawson recalled the preparations, it was "just like re-arming to face the threat of Hitler in the late 1930s". One of Thatcher's ministers, Nicholas Ridley, was the architect of a strategy based on simple principles. Only take on one group of workers at a time to avoid solidarity between workers. Introduce anti-union laws ... and allow for the fining of unions and the sequestration of funds. And change welfare legislation to deprive strikers and their families of social security support ... they built up coal stocks, diversified the provision of power, organised pools of lorry drivers to move coal and established a National Reporting Centre at New Scotland Yard to coordinate police intervention. The police were given an additional 11,000 officers trained in riot control. Ian MacGregor, one of those behind the sacking of convenor Derek Robinson in 1979 from Longbridge, a key car plant in Birmingham, and then butcher of the steel industry in 1981, was appointed chair of the National Coal Board (NCB) in September 1983. The day after Thatcher was re-elected in 1983, she appointed Peter Walker, a veteran of the 1972 days, as Minister of Energy with the words, "We're going to have a miners' strike." So when battle was finally engaged with the shock announcement of the closure of Cortonwood colliery on 1 March 1984, the Tories were embarking on civil war. A special cabinet committee met twice weekly to ensure centralised coordination. A year later the Tories had won.'

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Excerpted from "Over the Rainbow"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Nicola Field.
Excerpted by permission of Dog Horn Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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