We Didn't Cancel Durham Pride. We Took It Off the Taxpayer.

The parade goes ahead this weekend. The only thing missing is your money — and that, it turns out, is what really enrages them.

The above video was filmed at Redhills — the Durham Miners’ Hall. That’s the backdrop. Keep it in mind.

Durham Pride takes place this weekend. You may have missed that detail amid all the shrieking.

For a year the local activist grift has carried on as though Reform Durham had padlocked the rainbow, confiscated every sequin in the county and frogmarched the drag queens to a re-education camp somewhere outside the Durham Dales.

The truth is duller. Pride is going ahead. The parade will march. The flags will wave. The glitter, I’m reliably informed, will survive.

The only thing missing is a council taxpayer subsidy.

That’s the scandal. Not a ban — there is no ban. Not a cancellation — nobody cancelled anything. The outrage is that an elected council declined to make ordinary residents pay for a political event many of them want nothing to do with.

That distinction is the whole argument. So let me explain why it matters to me in particular.

What the Labour Movement Once Was

When I was a bairn I’d sit and listen to my late grandad tell stories of his youth. He held a pneumatic pick for so many years that, by the time he was my grandfather, he could no longer fully straighten his arm. His lungs were shot too. He never claimed a penny in compensation. Far too proud for that.

When I think of him, and the scores of men like him, I think of the coal fire roaring in his grate — coal that men like him used to drag out of the earth, coal that powered a country, an empire and entire communities for generations. I feel pride in my place and my past.

That is what the labour movement once meant. Dignity. Safety. A fair wage. Purpose. Standing up for men who came home black with dust and half-broken, determined their grandchildren would have it better.

The new version is rather different. The pits are shut, the communities hollowed out, and in place of wages, work, dignity and purpose we’ve been handed a narrow little creed of identity politics, grievance and obedience.

You’re still allowed to be working class, in fact it’s positively wrong not to be, unless you’re at the top of the trade unions — but you can be the wrong kind of working class. You see, you must vote the right way, chant the right slogans, bow before the right flags. Step out of line and you’re a class traitor.

The Wrong Sort — A Two-for-One Heretic

Which is how they see me. Worse, I’m apparently not just the wrong sort of working class but the wrong sort of gay man too. A two-for-one heretic. Very economical in the Rachel Reeves economy.

Pride Is Going Ahead. Your Money Isn’t.

This year-long row is over County Durham Pride. We refused to fund it from the public purse. I said residents deserve “bins emptied, roads fixed, and services funded. Not more council-sponsored politics in fancy dress” one year ago. I stand by every word.

Cue the moral panic. The shrieking could be heard only by dogs. We were accused of cancelling marginalised people, destroying Pride, dismantling equality and presumably unplugging every glitter machine between Durham and Darlington.

They Proved My Point For Me

And then, bless them, they proved my point for me.

The above video was filmed at Redhills — the Durham Miners’ Hall, built on the sacrifices of the coalfield. Now a stage for this.

There’s Equity — a trade union — announcing that because Reform wouldn’t pay, they’d “stepped up.” Then the message to us: “Last year you brought the flag down. This year we’re putting it right back up.”

In their own words. Not a village fête with rainbow cupcakes. Not a tombola with better eyeliner. A political challenge to an elected council — a declaration that the activists, not the voters, decide what the council blesses and bankrolls.

But look what they’ve admitted. Pride didn’t need our money to happen. Equity stepped up. Others stepped up. The event is going ahead. Good. That is precisely how civil society is meant to work: if you believe in a cause, you fundraise, you volunteer, you donate, you turn up. What you don’t get to do is post the bill to residents already paying through the nose for statutory services.

I’m told the clip even features a drag act with a name better suited to the back wall of a nightclub lavatory than a civil rights movement. This is what passes for moral seriousness now: a union, a double entendre and a lecture on dignity for they/them pronouns.

When I said taxpayers shouldn’t bankroll politics in fancy dress, they clutched their pearls. Then they went on camera and confirmed it was political all along. The mask slipped — though in this case it was probably covered in glitter.

Redhills: Monument to Miners, Megaphone for Activists

Then the Durham Miners’ Association waded in.

“Reform FOILED in plans to ruin Pride celebrations,” screamed the graphic, Nigel Farage circled in yellow like a pantomime villain who’d blundered into a student union freshers fair.

Again — notice the accidental confession. Pride is going ahead. We didn’t ruin it, ban it or stop it. We declined to fund it. If refusing a subsidy counts as “ruining” something, then every brass band, amateur football club and church-roof appeal in the county can claim martyrdom by spreadsheet.

This is the same Durham Miners’ Association whose Redhills Hall purports to honour the men of the coalfield. Men like my grandad. Men whose families still live in the towns the modern left now patronises and insults.

And when those families vote Reform — when they ask for controlled borders, lower bills, fixed roads and their country put first — they’re treated as though they’ve betrayed their own history.

They haven’t betrayed the coalfield. The activist class has.

The Durham left still adores the miner. But only as a sepia photograph. Only as a banner at the Gala. Only as a noble, safely dead figure to be wheeled out once a year for a wreath and a singalong. The living descendants are another matter entirely.

And then, with all the delicacy of a brick through a greenhouse, came this.

Also filmed at Redhills. The Durham Miners’ Hall — built on the bones of the coalfield, now used as a love-in for an ideology that treats children as ideological guinea pigs.

“The rise of the far right includes Reform,” he says. “Reform is the far right.” Not every voter, he graciously allows. Not every candidate. Just the party they back, the movement they vote for and the politics they want delivered. How kind. A pat on the head before the denunciation.

There it is, the modern union movement in a sentence: sentimental about working people in the past, venomous towards them in the present.

They love the miner as memory. They loathe him as voter.

It Turns Personal

And here’s where it turns personal. I’m gay — which, under the rules of identity politics, ought to make me one of their protected darlings. It doesn’t. Because identity only counts when it serves the approved politics.

I used to subscribe to the idea of pride. As a boy I hated myself. I was eleven when I realised that what the other lads spat at me in the playground, and what my late stepfather threw at me at home, was true. I thought my life would be lonely and miserable. On a council estate, with nobody like me in sight, I wondered whether it was worth carrying on at all.

So spare me the lecture that I don’t believe gay people should live freely. I do. I believe in equality before the law. I believe gay couples should live lives every bit as ordinary, loyal, happy and boring as anyone else’s. That was the victory worth winning.

But that is not what much of today’s LGBT lobby is about. Once the law was equal — relationships, pensions, inheritance, family — the wagon should have pulled into a lay-by, stuck the hazards on and admitted it had arrived. Instead it kept rolling, draped in more flags than a Soviet parade, driven by people who’d discovered there’s no funding stream quite like permanent victimhood.

The old campaign asked to be left alone to live. The new one demands you affirm every syllable of its politics, pay for it, and say thank you afterwards.

The Children They Won’t Discuss

And this is the part the polite refuse to touch. Picture that eleven-year-old on the estate today. Would he be told, gently, that there’s no shame in being gay? Or would someone murmur that his discomfort might mean his body was the problem — that hormones, or surgery, might make the ache go away?

In the name of kindness we’ve built a culture that invites troubled children to medicalise their distress before they’ve had the chance to grow into themselves. Children who, a generation ago, would simply have grown up to be gay men and lesbians. That isn’t liberation. It’s a scandal wearing a lanyard.

Say so and you’re denounced. Ask who profits and you’re denounced. Ask why working people should fund political pageants while the basics crumble and you’re denounced. The denunciation is the point. It saves them having to answer.

Because the answer is obvious. The old left lost the people it claimed to speak for. It no longer talks like Stanley, Consett or Easington. It talks like an HR department — all diversity consultants, charity executives and London lawyers. It swapped the pit village for the lanyard-clad policy seminar.

The people of this coalfield are not far right for wanting their country back. They are not bigots for wanting public money spent on public services. They are not traitors for refusing the joyless, taxpayer-funded religion now marching under the banner of so-called progress. Quite how this woman-erasing misogynistic movement represents progress I do not understand.

Durham Pride is going ahead this weekend. Nobody stopped it. Nobody banned it. Nobody cancelled it. It’s simply happening without dipping into your pocket.

That isn’t oppression. That’s adulthood.

The Betrayal Was Never From the Voters

The betrayal never came from the voters. It came from the institutions that abandoned them, insulted them, and then had the brass neck to pose in front of the banners of their forebears.

My grandad’s arm never straightened again because of the work he did. He carried that damage with pride. He didn’t do it so some union boss could one day brand his grandchildren extremists for refusing to bow to the latest fashionable flag.

The coalfield deserves better. And so do its people.