A RECORD-BREAKING crowd supported Saturday’s 10th annual With Banners Held High festival in Wakefield.

Forty trade union and campaign banners were marched through the West Yorkshire city to the street festival, celebrating the 1984-5 miners’ strike against pit closures and the labour and trade union movement with speeches, music and stalls.

Saturday’s festival was the biggest in the event’s history.

The march included the PCS union’s samba drum band, two brass bands and a delegation from the French CGT movement, which provided huge support for mining communities during the strike.

National Union of Mineworkers banners from former collieries in the Yorkshire and Durham coalfields were raised.

Women Against Pit Closures national secretary Heather Wood, from Easington in Co Durham, told how, 40 years ago to the day, thousands of women from mining communities had gathered in Barnsley in South Yorkshire.

She said WAPC became a political movement which changed women’s lives.

“None of those women went back to where they were,” she said. “They are still organising today.”

She was joined on stage by WAPC veteran Betty Cook, who led the singing of the movement’s anthem Women of the Working Class, bringing cheers from the crowd.

National Union of Mineworkers general secretary Chris Kitchen said the miners’ battles continue today through the Orgreave Truth & Justice Campaign and the campaign to end successive governments’ raids on the miners’ pensions funds.

The Orgreave Truth & Justice Campaign annual march and rally takes place in Sheffield on Saturday June 15, assembling at 1pm. The assembly point is to be announced.