WHAT PRICE PROGRESS?
HOW much working class history is really valued will be tested by a £6million appeal to renovate Redhills, Durham city’s magnificent pitman’s parliament.
Union delegates from 200 collieries once crowded on to its horseshoe wooden benches to argue about wages, jobs, hours and safety in a miners’ hall that Historic England lists as one of the country’s top 10 monuments to the power of protest and progress. Hailed as working class leadership in bricks and mortar, the money needed to restore and improve this grand building is pennies compared with £369million lavished on Buckingham Palace or up to £7.1billion for a Westminster Parliament, which discovered democracy long after Durham’s 200,000 pitmen. Tomorrow night’s meeting at Redhills will launch an appeal before next November’s celebration of 150 years of a Durham Miners’ Association. Ex-miner Dave Anderson, a former Labour MP who followed his dad and grandad down the pit, says the renovation will be a labour of love and pride in working class history. If a Government digging deep for the Queen leaves Durham’s marras (friends) to pass around the begging bowl and gamble on lottery funding, the establishment’s learned no lessons when contempt for working people triggered the Brexit backlash. Durham Miner’s Hall
GREASY
» deference is alive and stooping when the absurdly named ViceChamberlain of the Household, Tory crawler Andrew Stephenson, reportedly grassed up Speaker John Bercow after servile Conservatives wanted longer birthday greetings on Charlie’s 70th. The pensioner Prince of Waits warrants a retirement, not a birthday card.
ABSURD cooing over Amber
»
Rudd’s Cabinet return as May’s new best friend ignores the erstwhile Home Secretary’s failures. Rudderless would be sanctioned if she was a claimant rather than running the DWP.