Tim Tate - Pride: The Unlikely Story of the True Heroes of the Miners Strike

T his book tells the story of one of the most unlikely alliances in living memory.

In 1984 and 1985 a small group of metropolitan homosexual men and lesbian women stepped away from the vibrant hedonism of Londons gay scene to befriend and support the beleaguered villages of a very traditional mining community in the remote valleys of South Wales.

They did so in the midst of the most divisive strike in two generations and in one of the most turbulent times in modern British history. Five years earlier, Margaret Thatchers Conservative government had begun a radical programme to change the way the country had lived since the end of World War Two. That cosy, consensual One Nation approach to politics was to be replaced with an unforgivingly right-wing approach: there was, in Mrs Thatchers own words, no such thing as society. Henceforth, greed was not just good but God: making money was more important than making things, private profit was put before public need and, above all, the costs of change were to be borne by those least able to afford them.

Traditional manufacturing industries were sacrificed on the altar of the free market; unemployment rose inexorably and, across the north of England, Scotland and Wales, community after community became as a 1981 No.1 pop song bleakly observed a Ghost Town. Simultaneously, the previously lukewarm Cold War re-froze as American nuclear missiles arrived on air bases across the country.

The Thatcher revolution was profoundly unpopular. Opposition and anger mounted; riots erupted in cities across Britain. The governmental response was to increase state surveillance and police harassment. For those who lived through the early years of the 1980s, fear of poverty, of unemployment, of the authorities and of nuclear war was a very real and constant presence.

Conflict was, perhaps, inevitable: certainly, the government had planned for it. In 1984 it erupted: twenty-two months after defeating an external enemy Argentina in the Falklands, Mrs Thatcher and her allies declared war on what the Prime Minister described as the enemy within the men whose labour powered Britains homes and industry. The year-long miners strike was the longest and most bitterly fought industrial dispute since the 1926 General Strike. It divided the country, was marred by violence and devastated previously thriving mining communities.

That the government was in its mind engaged in an existential fight against a powerful foe was confirmed by one of the ministers most closely involved: the Energy Secretary described preparations for the battles to come as just like rearming to face the threat of Hitler in the 1930s. And, just as in 1939, all the powers of the State were to be focused on ensuring victory.

But the early 1980s was also a period in which another oppressed group came under renewed and sustained attack. After hundreds of years of persecution, homosexuality had been decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967 though, as we shall see, in reality gay men and lesbian women still faced discrimination and were frequently harassed.

The 1967 Sexual Offences Act removed the threat of imprisonment for gay men (lesbians were, as they had been throughout history, largely ignored) at least in limited circumstances. It became safer if not always safe to come out: as a result, gay communities emerged from their previous shadowy existence. Openly gay pubs and clubs did good business and, in London and the bigger cities at least, a sometimes ecstatically sybaritic nightlife flourished. In 1978 the Tom Robinson Bands unequivocally defiant anthem, Glad to Be Gay, spent weeks in the Top 20.

But if homosexuality was now the love which dared to broadcast its name, the endemic prejudice against it had not gone away. The BBC refused to broadcast Robinsons song in its Top 40 chart show. More seriously, many gay men still found themselves in court after being arrested by undercover police, while others received a criminal record for having the temerity to kiss their partners in public. Queer-bashing remained a very real threat and high-profile prosecutions targeted some of the nascent communitys most important supporting organisations.

And then AIDS arrived in Britain.

In 1981 a forty-nine-year-old man was admitted to Londons Brompton Hospital suffering from pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP). He died ten days later, becoming the countrys first known death from HIV/AIDS. By 1983 there were seventeen reported cases and the long-simmering prejudice against homosexuality re-surfaced. National newspapers ran endless stories about the gay plague, and public and religious leaders pronounced the disease to be Gods punishment on gay men for their sinful lifestyle. Homophobia was re-legitimised.

At the very height of this perfect storm, as the government and police battled the enemy within in communities across the land, and as newspapers whipped up fear of the perverts who had (supposedly) inflicted this lethal new pestilence upon the entire population, two groups who ostensibly had nothing in common miners and homosexuals unexpectedly made both common cause and lasting friendship.

It was an alliance that helped keep an entire valley clothed and fed during the darkest months of the strike, and it led directly to a long-overdue acceptance by trades unions and the Labour Party that homosexual equality was a cause to be championed.