Reform Councillors Are Not Invited to the Durham Miners’ Gala

As the brass bands, parade banners and thousands of trade unionists wind their way through Durham’s narrow streets next month for the city’s 139th Miners’ Gala, not everyone will be in attendance: Reform councillors are not invited.

The Durham Miners’ Association (DMA), which hosts the gala, said in a statement that while everyone in the city will be welcome at the event, Reform did not share its “beliefs in community, in the labour movement and in social justice” and that it would not “abandon” its principles.

Held in what was once a Labour stronghold, the summer festival – known as “the big meeting” and a staple of the union calendar – will this year take place under a Reform local council, after the party took control in May’s local elections, winning 65 of the 98 seats.

This year’s gala also comes amidst growing concerns from union leaders that Nigel Farage’s party is making inroads with their memberships. By donning trade union badges in parliament, stating that the party is “ready to be a friend to the unions” and calling for steel renationalisation, Reform has parked its tanks firmly on the labour movement’s lawn.

So far, the party’s pro-worker pivot has failed to convince trade union leaders. GMB general secretary Gary Smith called the party one of “the bankers, the chancers, the anti-union blowhards” at the union’s annual conference earlier this month.

But leaders are keenly aware that Reform’s pitch is aimed not so much at them, but at their members. Both Unite and the CWU have already warned that their members are responding to the party’s messaging.

The DMA said Farage’s call for the “reindustrialisation” of the UK was “cheap talk,” adding that the leader openly supported Margaret Thatcher, and had “praised the Tory assault on coal, steel, shipbuilding and other industries.”

It also pointed out that Reform had voted against Labour’s employment rights bill, and that its manifesto contained a commitment to “make it easier to hire and fire” workers. 

A spokesperson for Reform said the leaders of the DMA were “political dinosaurs” who clearly held the “thousands of former miners and their families who voted for Reform in complete disdain.”

The row began in earnest last month, after DMA general secretary Alan Mardghum told LBC that Farage would “never, ever, ever be invited” to the gala.

Mardghum, who worked as a miner at Sunderland’s Wearmouth Colliery for 16 years till its closure in 1993, said that he would boycott the gala if the DMA “ever contemplated” inviting Reform.

In response, Darren Grimes, a former GB News presenter newly elected as Reform’s deputy leader on Durham county council, said that “miners and their families” had been “told to get stuffed for voting for Reform” by the DMA.

Grimes said: “My grandad was a Durham miner. And now his grandson, elected by his own community, that my grandfather went down underground to serve, is being told that he’s not welcome at the gala that’s meant to honour men like him.”

He said that people who voted for Reform had been “banned from celebrating their own heritage” as they weren’t “the right kind of working class.”

The DMA hit back, saying that the party was happy for “nasty racists” to serve as councillors, noting that Grimes was accused of Islamophobia last year by the Muslim Council of Britain, and stating that “his supporters’ group on Facebook is an open sewer of racism and support for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon” (the real name of Tommy Robinson). 

This isn’t the first political row over gala attendance. In 2020, newly elected Tory MPs were told by Mardghum that they had “categorically no chance” of receiving an official invite to the event.

The association said: “Conservative MPs have never attended the Durham Miners’ Gala as official invitees or, as far as we know, the parade itself. None of them have ever supported the DMA or Gala.”

Ed Miliband became the first Labour leader to address the gala since Neil Kinnock when he spoke in 2011. Despite having once lived in Durham, and being an MP for a Durham mining seat, Tony Blair never attended the gala during his 10-year stint as prime minister, nor did his successor Gordon Brown.

In 2015, the gala had a surprise guest: Thatcher’s corpse. Former miner Mick Woods, who’d worked at South Yorkshire’s Manvers colliery till its closure in 1988, built an open-topped coffin containing an effigy of the former Tory leader.