Pride and Prejudice. Ben McCall Once upon a time there was a lad of 22, from inner-city Liverpool, living in North Wales. He was young, idealistic and unemployed. Just up the road, towards the dark mountains towering above Llyn (lake) Ogwen, the slate quarry workers in Bethesda had been on strike for the longest in British history. Three long years, hard to imagine. That was back in 1903, but some people there still refuse to live in a ‘scabs house’ generations later. This was 1984 and the miner’s strike was beginning across the UK. Reader, that lad was me and I was planning to launch myself headlong into one of the most fantastic years of human interaction. The excuse for reminiscing this time is the film Pride, based on the formation and life of Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). Spoiler alert: film content discussed! The early 1980s were a very politically charged time. Maggie T had ascended the throne in 1979, single-handedly won the Falklands War and another general
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election in 1983. Describing Nelson Mandela as “a terrorist”, Jimmy Saville was a regular house guest; then she picked on the miners. Many of us thought “great, Ted Heath tried this in the 1970s and it brought his government down, we can do it again.” Thus began the epic struggle. From nowhere up pops a bunch of poofs and a coupla dykes daan in Landun, who want to help their hetero bros and sisters in West Wales. Both gays and miners are being picked on by the police, press and right-wing politicians, so should support each other. That’s how the film starts, but of course boys and girls the reality was somewhat different. My friend Ray Goodspeed, who I got to know in 2013, was one of the founders of LGSM. By then he had been in a Trotskyist sect, Militant, for nearly ten years, but left during the strike “…they didn’t support or even acknowledge LGSM and had a very dismissive position on gay rights.” He was a consultant for the film and appeared as an extra for 1.5 seconds.
Photography: images from the New Fringe ‘What’s Left’ exhibition by Andy Lynch ©2014
In 1984 I was a member of the Communist Party and my comrade Mark Ashton, another of the founders of LGSM, was leader of the CP’s youth organisation. As Ray says, in a recent interview about the film, “A meeting was called at Mark’s council flat … of the eleven people who started LGSM, we were all either Trotskyists, communists or very close friends of communists. But it’s also true that in a very short time we sucked in people who absolutely weren’t.” (in Dear-love-of-comrades-rememberinglesbians-and-gays-support-the-miners: rs21.org.uk)
The most disappointing thing about the film, and a sign-of-the-times we are currently in, is that the makers and/ or financial backers thought that any more than a fleeting reference to politics would either put people off or go over their heads. But left politics was central to the times and the strike; it cannot be understood if this is ignored or downplayed.