AGAINST the government, against Reform UK.

The politics of the biggest celebration of working-class culture in Europe, the Durham Miners’ Gala, were clear — and angry — on Saturday.

The approach, common to speeches from Durham Miners’ Association leader Alan Mardghum, trade unionists and independent MP Jeremy Corbyn, was surely the correct one: uncompromising opposition to the far right and the poison it spreads about immigrants and refugees, but an absolute refusal to line up behind Labour as the lesser of two evils.

Doing so — still the default position of too many in the unions — is self-defeating.

It is, as the leader of one of Britain’s biggest unions put it over the weekend, to roll out the red carpet for Nigel Farage.

Working-class people furious at cuts to services, the destruction of industries as seen at Port Talbot or Grangemouth, the shrinking value of pay and pensions, will not give the left a hearing if it acts as an apologist for the government responsible.

As the leader of another of Britain’s biggest unions, Sharon Graham of Unite, said on Saturday: “People ask us why we are attacking a Labour government. It’s because that government is attacking working people.”

Anger will be seized on by the right, and misdirected against the innocent, unless it is channelled by the left and directed against the guilty: Britain’s billionaires, whose wealth has increased by 150 per cent since 2010. The 50 families who own more than the poorer half of Britain’s 70 million people put together.

The corporations whose profit margins soar while working-class people are hammered by an inflationary crisis. The masters of war for whom dead Palestinian children simply signify an increase in the value of their shares in armament firms from Lockheed Martin to BAE Systems.

Currently, working-class anger is being misdirected. And that was soberingly evident in Durham over the weekend. This is, after all, a county which recently elected a Reform-dominated council.

The Big Meeting is in some ways the most important event in the labour movement calendar, because it is the only city-wide trade union event: one where the local community turn out in their tens of thousands. And so it is a bellwether.

The crowds lining the streets were not uniformly sympathetic to the socialist and anti-imperialist politics of the event, and parts of the procession encountered hostility. This did not detract from the size and enthusiasm of the crowds on the Gala field, but we have to recognise it.

A large section of the working class is alienated from the left, something the right can exploit to devastating effect, as Boris Johnson did by weaponising the question of EU membership in 2019. Brexit may be history, but the cultural gulf it exposed remains and will continue to make itself felt on other questions. We cannot afford to ignore this.

Labour’s vote rose everywhere in 2017, when Jeremy Corbyn bagged it its biggest vote increase in seven decades, winning three million more votes than Keir Starmer got last year. It rose in the “red wall,” but also won former Tory strongholds like Canterbury and surged right across the true-blue Conservative heartlands. Left policies are popular: but as 2019 showed, the right can exploit cultural disconnects to nullify that.

How to overcome this, to rebuild a class-against-class politics, is the biggest question for any serious left project: and any left-of-Labour alternative, as currently being organised, must consider the contrasting 2017 and 2019 experiences if it is to enjoy more than localised success.

The starting point — as showcased by the brilliant speeches at the Durham Miners’ Gala — is that we focus our attacks on our rulers, our oppressors.

The status quo is not acceptable, and pretending it is for fear of something worse will only accelerate the frightening rise of the right and its politics of division.