Strikes me that labour movement is in good spirits

AND so to Wakefield, once dubbed the Merrie City, for a classic slice of workingclass culture.

The annual Banners Held High festival celebrates the day the miners went back to work after a year on strike, proudly bearing aloft the colours of their union.

It was particularly appropriate this year, 40 years after that momentous event. Out of defeat comes defiance.

“Forty years and still the enemy within,” was a T-shirt message I saw everywhere, recalling Thatcher’s denunciation of the strikers.

A march of Yorkshire NUM banners – Selby, Kellingley, Pontefract, Wheldale (where my grandfather was a colliery winder) – wound through the streets behind two bands, one silver and one brass. Hundreds turned out for the parade, from unions as diverse as actors, teachers and civil servants to the rail unions Aslef and RMT and Unison.

It was noisy, good-humoured and assertive, and it did my heart good to see the labour movement in such good spirits.

All is not lost. And there is unfinished business. Chris Kitchen, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (yes, it’s still going, won’t lie down) headed the list of speakers with a demand that Labour sets up a public inquiry into the Great Strike, particularly the untold story of the so-called Battle of Orgreave in June 1984.

No trip of mine to Wakey is complete without a visit to the Red Shed, the city’s spiritual, indeed actual, Labour home. It is red and it is a wooden shed, and like the party, it has survived many vicissitudes.

Here, I enjoyed Ready To Strike, a hoppy pale ale. At three quid a pint, honest, a case not so much of “everybody out!” as “everybody in!”