By Elliot Crossan
Being a revolutionary can be a lonely experience. To look at the world and see all the oppression, the injustice, the various crises faced by our society — it is overwhelming. To sit scrolling through horrific images of Palestinian homes lying in rubble, next to images of floods and wildfires caused by catastrophic climate change, next to news stories about Donald Trump and Elon Musk plundering the US state for all it is worth, next to the latest inflammatory statements from David Seymour as he stokes the fires of hatred and division in Aotearoa. It is far too easy to give in, and despair at the prospects of society changing for the better. It is far too easy to feel hopeless and powerless.
The film Pride (2014) provides the perfect antidote to these feelings. It is hard to capture the spirit of the film by describing its plot — it is based on a true story, depicting the activism of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), a solidarity group which formed to support the National Union of Miners (NUM) in their 1984-85 strike against the Thatcher government in the UK. The members of LGSM travelled from London, where they had raised an impressive amount of money for the miners’ cause, to South Wales, where they handed it over to the Neath, Dulais and Swansea Valleys Miners Support Group.
Pride is a fitting title for the film, but perhaps an even better name would have been Solidarity. The story pivots around this theme. The initial hesitance of the traditional mining community in Dulais Valley to accept money from a queer organisation gives way swiftly to joy as lifelong friendships are formed and homophobic prejudices evaporate. The catharsis is unmatched. System Change kicked off 2025 with a screening of this beautiful film; if you haven’t seen it already, I would urge you to stop reading this review now and go and watch it.
“There’s a lodge banner down in the welfare. We bring it out for special occasions. It’s a hundred years old. I’ll show it to you one day. It’s a symbol like this — two hands. That’s what the labour movement means. Should mean. You support me and I support you. Whoever you are. Wherever you come from. Shoulder to shoulder. Hand to hand.”
This line from Dai Donovan (played by Paddy Considine), the spokesperson for the local miners support group, encapsulates the central message of the film: that solidarity is power, and that solidarity can only truly exist on the basis of opposing all forms of oppression.
Bottom: The real-life banner of Dulais Valley Miners, referred to in the film
The power of the ruling class is highly concentrated. It is relatively easy for the top 1% to organise collectively to advance their interests. When up against the combined strength of the capitalists, the government, the police and the right-wing media, each individual worker and each community in isolation has relatively little power. We only have power when we organise to stand together and fight back as a collective.
Union miners represented a fundamental challenge to British capitalism because of their ability to cripple the entire economy by collectively withdrawing their labour. The 1974 Miner’s Strike played a major role in bringing down the Conservative government of Edward Heath. This is why the government of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) set out so determinedly to crush the miners. In 1984, Thatcher famously branded the NUM leadership as “the enemy within.”
Thatcher’s war against the NUM succeeded, and the consequences were tragic. The Miner’s Strike was defeated in 1985, in a defeat which represented a blow so devastating to the union movement in Britain that the working class is still recovering to this day. In Aotearoa, the National government led by Jim Bolger in the early 1990s took inspiration from Thatcher when passing union-busting laws. In both countries, it is only through recovering from the defeats of the 80s-90s and rebuilding the labour movement that we can restore our collective power to resist capitalism.
The founders of LGSM saw clearly the importance of this struggle, and drew the links between the oppression faced by the miners and the oppression faced by the queer community. They understood that Thatcher’s homophobic government could only be defeated through working class solidarity.
LGSM were unapologetic and proud about being a lesbian and gay organisation. They did not try to hide their identities, despite the huge persecution their community faced from the police and from homophobia in the wider public. Some may have argued at the time that LGSM members would have been more effective in supporting the miners if they had organised without being explicit about their queerness. They would have been wrong to do so.
It is through breaking down the divisions in working class society that we bring ourselves closer to our collective liberation. To bring queer issues, women’s issues, black and brown issues, and in Aotearoa indigenous issues to the forefront of the conversation does not divide the working class. The working class is already divided by the capitalists, and deliberately so, through the tools of homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, racism — the list goes on. Solidarity means standing together against the oppression of everyone, not papering over the cracks to forge a false sense of unity.
Forging solidarity on this basis of fighting shared oppression is the task LGSM set out to achieve, as is so evocatively depicted in Pride. This message is hammered home when Bill Nighy’s character, Cliff Barry, comes out as gay towards the end of the film. The homophobia of society was already dividing the mining community, to the extent that Cliff had to hide his identity for most of his life. When LGSM gave their support to the miners and barriers began to break down in Dulais, Cliff was finally able to discover his pride as a gay man. The unity of the miner’s union was strengthened as a result.
It is unfortunate that one of the greatest failings of solidarity depicted in the film was played as a joke. The fact that Lesbians Against Pit Closures was formed as a splinter group, charging LGSM with being a misogynistic and male-dominated organisation, demonstrated an inability to overcome division within the LGBT community. Had LGSM been able to unite on the basis of solidarity against misogyny, and against the different forms of oppression faced by queer women, the organisation and the movement would have been stronger for it.
Yes, it is bloody typical of leftists to splinter into a billion different factions fighting among themselves, hence the eye-roll comedy. But this issue could have been presented more seriously as a very real failure of solidarity which contradicted the entire political project embodied by LGSM.
One other criticism of Pride is that, while the socialist and communist politics of members of both LGSM and the NUM are referenced explicitly, the role of revolutionary organisations is downplayed. This is fairly understandable for a mass-market film — but it is an important fact for revolutionaries to highlight.
Ben Schnetzer portrayed charismatic LGSM leader Mark Ashton in the film, in a performance so vivid that real-life LGSM member Reggie Blennerhassett described it as hard to watch — because it was “like he had come back to life.” Ashton was one of the many victims of the AIDs epidemic, and passed away in 1987 aged just 26.
Ashton was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the General Secretary of the Young Communist League. Ashton’s writings on LGSM remember the first meeting consisting entirely of members of either the Communist Party or the Labour Party. Other organisations involved in LGSM included the Socialist Workers Party and the International Marxist Group.
That’s not to say that it was only dedicated Marxists who were involved in LGSM. Once the organisation was established, members included: “communists and anarchists, feminists and Trotskyists, liberals and labourites, machos and minis’; and ‘just ordinary, working-class people who have seen the tragedy of the pit closures programme’.
However, it is clear that organised revolutionaries played a major role in the formation and success of LGSM. Ashton’s role in the Young Communist League is not an accident or a coincidence — Marxist organisations provide members with the theoretical and organisational tools necessary to build the solidarity that is needed to fight back against capitalism. By understanding the system in its totality, revolutionaries are able to see where organisation is necessary in order to strengthen resistance. The legacy of LGSM provides a reminder of the vital importance of Marxist politics and organisation.
The Miner’s Strike failed to defeat Thatcherism. But the tear-jerking final scene of the film depicts the ultimate payoff of the solidarity demonstrated by LGSM. NUM members arrive en masse to attend the 1985 London Pride march, and onscreen text tells us that lesbian and gay rights were enshrined into the Labour Party manifesto later that year, thanks in no small part to a block vote from the NUM. Billy Bragg’s anthem There Is Power in a Union is accompanied by a swelling orchestra, and the audience is left with a powerful reminder of the very real change that can be achieved when working people stand together.
Thatcher was eventually brought down thanks to collective action, through the mass movement opposing the Poll Tax, culminating in the riots of 1990. Subsequent governments relaxed and ultimately removed harsh laws which discriminated against the queer community.
Our responsibility as revolutionaries today, in Aotearoa and around the world, is to resist the urge to give in to despair and hopelessness, no matter how bad things get. We are faced in this country with a right-wing government that is directly attacking the living standards of the working class, while simultaneously attempting to divide us by trying to turn Pākehā against Māori. In the process, the Coalition intends to tear up indigenous rights which have been won through decades of determined struggle.
Our task is to build a movement which can resist attacks on Māori and Te Tiriti, while at the same time resisting the economic policies of the government that are designed to the rich richer and everyone else poorer. Austerity and privatisation must be stopped; the war on indigenous rights must be stopped. These objectives can only be won through solidarity between workers, whether Māori, Pākehā or tauiwi. We are only strong if we stand together.
Lesbians and gays were the primary targets of anti-LGBT backlash in the 1980s; today it is the transgender community in the firing line. Just as solidarity between the labour movement and the lesbian and gay movement was crucial 40 years ago, so today it is vitally important that workers stand arm-in-arm with our transgender whanau against hateful and oppressive rhetoric.
The struggle against Thatcherism is merely one among countless examples in history where revolutionary organisations have played a crucial role in leading resistance. It is time to rebuild socialist politics in Aotearoa, and to build socialist organisations in the process. Only when we understand that our ultimate goal is to overthrow the entire capitalist system, and all of the forms of oppression associated with it, can we coherently organise resistance with the political vision and willpower needed to succeed.
We feel lonely when we are not organised. We feel hopeless and powerless when we are not organised. None of these feelings are inevitable; nor is our society’s slide towards the authoritarian right. It is time to build collective power and fight back. Pride serves as a powerful reminder that we are strongest when we stand together. An injury to one is an injury to all. Only through solidarity and organisation can oppression be overcome.
Elliot Crossan is an ecosocialist writer and activist from Auckland. He is the Chair of System Change Aotearoa.
