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When Queers & Coal Miners United: Lessons For Today
In the 1980s, while President Ronald Reagan’s administration was breaking a strike of 11,000 air traffic controllers and ignoring the AIDS epidemic, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was carrying out her own brutal attacks in Britain. Thatcher, much like Trump today, concentrated power in her own hands and reshaped the courts to do her bidding.
But these attacks on the British working class also inspired deep solidarity between unlikely allies: big-city queers and rural Welsh coal miners. The story of their battle against Thatcher is a crucial lesson in how working-class solidarity can be forged across very different sections of workers to fight back against right-wing strongmen like Trump—an urgent task for today’s queer activists building a fighting Pride and for all workers who see what’s at stake in the fight against the right wing.
The British labor movement was powerful when Thatcher took office in 1979. A wave of factory occupations against closures and an all-out miners strike in the early ’70s halted the production and delivery of coal, strangling the Tories (Thatcher’s Conservative Party) and forcing them out of government in 1974. Sympathy strikes surged in this period; many workers understood that class-wide solidarity was key to victory. In 1980, 13 million workers were union members—over 50% of the workforce!
That’s why one of Thatcher’s key aims at the beginning of the neoliberal era was to profoundly undermine the trade union movement. After carefully stockpiling coal in secret for years, she went after the powerful National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) with the announcement of mass closures of government-owned coal pits. Thatcher’s plan was to save money by importing coal and gas rather than paying the good wages British miners had earned through years of militant strike action. This was a massive assault that would leave thousands of jobs and the livelihoods of entire towns on the line.
At the same time, the queer rights movement was just starting to emerge. In 1967, homosexuality was partially decriminalized, but the age of consent for gay couples was much higher than for straight couples (21 for gays, 16 for straight people). An estimated 15,000 were convicted of underage same-sex activity under these discriminatory laws. In 1970, organizers inspired by the Stonewall riots formed the Gay Liberation Front, and London held its first Pride parade in 1972. With the advent of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, the Tories and the media used the health crisis to smear and defame queer people.
Much of the working class—unionized and nonunionized, young and old—heroically fought back against Thatcher’s attacks. But there’s one part of this history that is less frequently told: a group of initially less than a dozen young queer activists in London who got organized to support small-town miners who had seemingly little in common with them. Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners was created to raise money for striking mining communities in recognition that queer people and miners had the same enemy: the right-wing, pro-capitalist government of Margaret Thatcher. In doing so, they set an example to be remembered forever.
The queer community had seen firsthand the brutality of Thatcher’s policies, and many knew that this division had to be fought with solidarity. If Thatcher broke the miners’ strike, the entire working class would be worse off no matter what their sexuality, and the state would have an opportunity to further attack the LGBTQ community and all workers.
The Tories expected a quick victory. They hadn’t anticipated the courage and determination of the mining communities to defend their livelihoods or the solidarity they inspired from the rest of the working class. Thatcher froze the union’s funds, so working-class organizations immediately took up the task of independent fundraising for the NUM.
Members of the Labour Party tabled outside of grocery stores in working class neighborhoods to raise money. Organizations like Women Against Pit Closures emerged to provide important strike support, alongside women in mining communities playing a key role in keeping their communities running. Students staged walkouts to show their support. Militant (the Marxist left wing of the Labour Party, and Socialist Alternative’s sister section in England, Wales and Scotland at the time) played an important role in fundraising and organizing solidarity actions in Britain and around the world.
Militant advocated for a class-struggle strategy to win the strike and the need for socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism itself, which had caused the financial crisis in the first place. Over the course of the strike, hundreds of miners were won over to revolutionary politics and joined Militant. This Pride Month, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners offers especially important lessons for fighting Trump and the far right today.
At the start, LGSM was just 11 people operating out of a local gay bookstore. There was skepticism from some in the queer community—why should queer people defend the miners when miners hadn’t been coming out in defense of queer rights? But while some in the mining communities had backwards views of gay people at the start of the strike, the badly-needed material support they received was quick to stir up deep feelings of solidarity, and this won over the vast majority of the striking miners to rethink their views.
By the end of the strike, LGSM had grown from 11 activists in London to 11 chapters around the country. In London alone they raised £22,500 (over $900,000 today). The miners began to realize, like the founding members of LGSM had known, that they needed help in this life-or-death fight against a shared enemy, and many resolved that when gay people inevitably needed help fighting against Thatcher in the future, they would answer the call.
In May 1984, LGSM organized Pits and Perverts, a benefit concert that raised £6,000 (over $33,000 today) for the strike. The title was inspired by the slander in the press about both queer people and the striking miners. In a speech to the crowd, a spokesperson from the union said, “We will support you. It won’t change overnight, but now 140,000 miners know that there are other causes and other problems… We will never be the same.”
True to their word, hundreds of National Union of Mineworkers members marched at the very front of the 1985 London Gay Pride parade alongside LGSM activists in solidarity with those who had fought alongside them. Later that year, they took up and won resolutions in support of queer rights in the Labour Party and the Trade Union Congress. They also took up the fight against Section 28, legislation banning local authorities or schools from “promoting homosexuality.” Many of those who led LGSM remained involved in both the queer rights and union movements, encouraging workers’ unity in the fight against all types of oppression.
A militant lead and a true socialist alternative to rally around could have changed the course of the movement. The fundamental viewpoint of the Labour Party leadership was the mistaken idea that capitalism can be reformed to meet the needs of the working class. Without a revolutionary outlook, the movement was forced to fight with one arm tied behind its back and never reached its full potential.
Even though the miners’ strike ended in defeat, the Conservative government was also significantly weakened. Only a few years later, Thatcher was forced to resign after a mass movement against the “poll tax” led by Militant. The poll tax was a regressive tax imposed on every person over 18 and resulted in millions of workers becoming ineligible to vote. Militant was decisive in leading a mass non-payment campaign. The solidarity built up during the miners’ strike strengthened the anti-poll tax movement and made it possible to eventually drive Thatcher out of office.
We won’t be able to stop Trump’s assault solely by putting our faith in the courts, whose rulings Trump frequently ignores anyway. We can’t rely on the legal system and other capitalist institutions in the fight against authoritarians like Trump who were created by capitalism itself—the only way to win lasting gains is to rely on the independent, organized and united power of the working class, in all its diversity.
Social struggles against oppression and workplace struggles against exploitation aren’t separate fights. They ultimately have the same enemy: the billionaire class. The capitalist class are the ones who stand to benefit most from the exploitation and oppression of vast swaths of society—our pain is their power and profits. The entire working class needs to take up demands around protecting trans people from right-wing attacks, including fighting bathroom and sports bans, and fight for free and legal gender-affirming healthcare for all ages, as part of free universal healthcare as a whole, just to name a few.
While the example of LGSM is inspiring, the responsibility doesn’t just lie with gay activists to show up in solidarity of striking workers—the LGBTQ community needs to see the entire labor movement showing up to fight their battles, too. The working class is strongest when united across all boundaries—gender, sexuality, race, nationality, disability, etc. History shows that the most powerful strikes are those that mobilize working people across society, both union and non-union workers, and across racial, gender, national lines and more. Unions must not only fight for their own members but for the working class as a whole!
This Pride Month, we need to revive the spirit of the miners’ strike and the queer activists who boldly fought back against both Thatcher and homophobic ideas in the working class.
Capitalism is the root of all oppression, including transphobia, homophobia, and racism. These days, with an emboldened far right, the fight against backwards ideas can feel like we’re always taking one step forward and two steps back. That’s why it’s so important to build a powerfully united, working-class movement fighting for a complete transformation of society into a socialist one, where there is no more material basis for division and oppression. Only then can we sweep away oppressive ideas—not just a little bit at a time, but for good.
When Queers & Coal Miners United: Lessons For Today
In the 1980s, while President Ronald Reagan’s administration was breaking a strike of 11,000 air traffic controllers and ignoring the AIDS epidemic, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was carrying out her own brutal attacks in Britain. Thatcher, much like Trump today, concentrated power in her own hands and reshaped the courts to do her bidding.
But these attacks on the British working class also inspired deep solidarity between unlikely allies: big-city queers and rural Welsh coal miners. The story of their battle against Thatcher is a crucial lesson in how working-class solidarity can be forged across very different sections of workers to fight back against right-wing strongmen like Trump—an urgent task for today’s queer activists building a fighting Pride and for all workers who see what’s at stake in the fight against the right wing.
Thatcher & The Ruling Class Declare War
In the 1970s and early ’80s, the capitalist class was desperately searching for ways to maintain profitability in the midst of a global recession. In Britain, Thatcher was the weapon they chose to carry out massive attacks on the working class in order to take back the gains workers had made in the previous decades. This included enacting sweeping privatizations and austerity to take money from workers and put it in the pockets of the bosses—but it meant ripping jobs and benefits away from workers who weren’t willing to go down without a fight.The British labor movement was powerful when Thatcher took office in 1979. A wave of factory occupations against closures and an all-out miners strike in the early ’70s halted the production and delivery of coal, strangling the Tories (Thatcher’s Conservative Party) and forcing them out of government in 1974. Sympathy strikes surged in this period; many workers understood that class-wide solidarity was key to victory. In 1980, 13 million workers were union members—over 50% of the workforce!
That’s why one of Thatcher’s key aims at the beginning of the neoliberal era was to profoundly undermine the trade union movement. After carefully stockpiling coal in secret for years, she went after the powerful National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) with the announcement of mass closures of government-owned coal pits. Thatcher’s plan was to save money by importing coal and gas rather than paying the good wages British miners had earned through years of militant strike action. This was a massive assault that would leave thousands of jobs and the livelihoods of entire towns on the line.
At the same time, the queer rights movement was just starting to emerge. In 1967, homosexuality was partially decriminalized, but the age of consent for gay couples was much higher than for straight couples (21 for gays, 16 for straight people). An estimated 15,000 were convicted of underage same-sex activity under these discriminatory laws. In 1970, organizers inspired by the Stonewall riots formed the Gay Liberation Front, and London held its first Pride parade in 1972. With the advent of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, the Tories and the media used the health crisis to smear and defame queer people.
Much of the working class—unionized and nonunionized, young and old—heroically fought back against Thatcher’s attacks. But there’s one part of this history that is less frequently told: a group of initially less than a dozen young queer activists in London who got organized to support small-town miners who had seemingly little in common with them. Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners was created to raise money for striking mining communities in recognition that queer people and miners had the same enemy: the right-wing, pro-capitalist government of Margaret Thatcher. In doing so, they set an example to be remembered forever.
The queer community had seen firsthand the brutality of Thatcher’s policies, and many knew that this division had to be fought with solidarity. If Thatcher broke the miners’ strike, the entire working class would be worse off no matter what their sexuality, and the state would have an opportunity to further attack the LGBTQ community and all workers.
The Miners’ Strike Begins
In March 1984, Thatcher announced that 20 coal pits would close and 20,000 workers would lose their jobs. This sparked a year-long strike by the NUM in defense of the miners’ jobs. The courts and corporate politicians pursued every opportunity to undermine the union—right of assembly and freedom of speech were curtailed and arbitrary arrests were common. Social security benefits and tax refunds were denied to miners’ families to starve them.The Tories expected a quick victory. They hadn’t anticipated the courage and determination of the mining communities to defend their livelihoods or the solidarity they inspired from the rest of the working class. Thatcher froze the union’s funds, so working-class organizations immediately took up the task of independent fundraising for the NUM.
Members of the Labour Party tabled outside of grocery stores in working class neighborhoods to raise money. Organizations like Women Against Pit Closures emerged to provide important strike support, alongside women in mining communities playing a key role in keeping their communities running. Students staged walkouts to show their support. Militant (the Marxist left wing of the Labour Party, and Socialist Alternative’s sister section in England, Wales and Scotland at the time) played an important role in fundraising and organizing solidarity actions in Britain and around the world.
Militant advocated for a class-struggle strategy to win the strike and the need for socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism itself, which had caused the financial crisis in the first place. Over the course of the strike, hundreds of miners were won over to revolutionary politics and joined Militant. This Pride Month, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners offers especially important lessons for fighting Trump and the far right today.
Lesbians & Gays Support The Miners
Just months after the strike started, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners emerged. It was a small group formed by activists within the London queer community. Mark Ashton, the founder of the group, was inspired by the miners’ fight against the government and the police and recognized that they had a common enemy and a common struggle.At the start, LGSM was just 11 people operating out of a local gay bookstore. There was skepticism from some in the queer community—why should queer people defend the miners when miners hadn’t been coming out in defense of queer rights? But while some in the mining communities had backwards views of gay people at the start of the strike, the badly-needed material support they received was quick to stir up deep feelings of solidarity, and this won over the vast majority of the striking miners to rethink their views.
By the end of the strike, LGSM had grown from 11 activists in London to 11 chapters around the country. In London alone they raised £22,500 (over $900,000 today). The miners began to realize, like the founding members of LGSM had known, that they needed help in this life-or-death fight against a shared enemy, and many resolved that when gay people inevitably needed help fighting against Thatcher in the future, they would answer the call.
In May 1984, LGSM organized Pits and Perverts, a benefit concert that raised £6,000 (over $33,000 today) for the strike. The title was inspired by the slander in the press about both queer people and the striking miners. In a speech to the crowd, a spokesperson from the union said, “We will support you. It won’t change overnight, but now 140,000 miners know that there are other causes and other problems… We will never be the same.”
True to their word, hundreds of National Union of Mineworkers members marched at the very front of the 1985 London Gay Pride parade alongside LGSM activists in solidarity with those who had fought alongside them. Later that year, they took up and won resolutions in support of queer rights in the Labour Party and the Trade Union Congress. They also took up the fight against Section 28, legislation banning local authorities or schools from “promoting homosexuality.” Many of those who led LGSM remained involved in both the queer rights and union movements, encouraging workers’ unity in the fight against all types of oppression.
Miners Lost But Thatcher Eventually Defeated
Ultimately, the miners’ strike was defeated after a year. The national Trade Union Confederation refused to take action, and solidarity strikes in other industries were never successfully organized by the Labour Party and other workers’ organizations. The miners were starved out by the government’s attacks. They didn’t know this at the time, but if the strike had been able to keep going for just a few more weeks, the government stockpile of coal would have completely run out, and Thatcher would have been forced to concede to the workers’ demands.A militant lead and a true socialist alternative to rally around could have changed the course of the movement. The fundamental viewpoint of the Labour Party leadership was the mistaken idea that capitalism can be reformed to meet the needs of the working class. Without a revolutionary outlook, the movement was forced to fight with one arm tied behind its back and never reached its full potential.
Even though the miners’ strike ended in defeat, the Conservative government was also significantly weakened. Only a few years later, Thatcher was forced to resign after a mass movement against the “poll tax” led by Militant. The poll tax was a regressive tax imposed on every person over 18 and resulted in millions of workers becoming ineligible to vote. Militant was decisive in leading a mass non-payment campaign. The solidarity built up during the miners’ strike strengthened the anti-poll tax movement and made it possible to eventually drive Thatcher out of office.
Lessons For Today
The strategy of the right wing depends on divide-and-rule tactics to drive wedges between native-born and immigrant workers, to separate the struggles of trans and nonbinary people from the rest of the queer rights movement, and to isolate the labor movement from the fight against oppression. There is a serious danger presented here and now if the organized working class does not show up to beat back Trump’s attacks. In the absence of a serious fightback based in class-struggle methods, Trump 2.0 will grow bolder and will mount even more drastic attacks against LGBTQ people and all workers.We won’t be able to stop Trump’s assault solely by putting our faith in the courts, whose rulings Trump frequently ignores anyway. We can’t rely on the legal system and other capitalist institutions in the fight against authoritarians like Trump who were created by capitalism itself—the only way to win lasting gains is to rely on the independent, organized and united power of the working class, in all its diversity.
Social struggles against oppression and workplace struggles against exploitation aren’t separate fights. They ultimately have the same enemy: the billionaire class. The capitalist class are the ones who stand to benefit most from the exploitation and oppression of vast swaths of society—our pain is their power and profits. The entire working class needs to take up demands around protecting trans people from right-wing attacks, including fighting bathroom and sports bans, and fight for free and legal gender-affirming healthcare for all ages, as part of free universal healthcare as a whole, just to name a few.
While the example of LGSM is inspiring, the responsibility doesn’t just lie with gay activists to show up in solidarity of striking workers—the LGBTQ community needs to see the entire labor movement showing up to fight their battles, too. The working class is strongest when united across all boundaries—gender, sexuality, race, nationality, disability, etc. History shows that the most powerful strikes are those that mobilize working people across society, both union and non-union workers, and across racial, gender, national lines and more. Unions must not only fight for their own members but for the working class as a whole!
This Pride Month, we need to revive the spirit of the miners’ strike and the queer activists who boldly fought back against both Thatcher and homophobic ideas in the working class.
Capitalism is the root of all oppression, including transphobia, homophobia, and racism. These days, with an emboldened far right, the fight against backwards ideas can feel like we’re always taking one step forward and two steps back. That’s why it’s so important to build a powerfully united, working-class movement fighting for a complete transformation of society into a socialist one, where there is no more material basis for division and oppression. Only then can we sweep away oppressive ideas—not just a little bit at a time, but for good.
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