A LABOUR government can deliver a step change in relations with the labour movement and deliver much-needed investment in working-class communities, Durham Miners’ Association president Stephen Guy believes — but it needs to be much more ambitious to achieve that.

“Ministers have been inviting trade union leaders in for discussions within a matter of days, so that’s welcome. But it’s not at the point where we want it to be.”

We meet in the County Hotel on the morning of the Miners’ Gala, in a special year given it is the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike.

The anniversary remains important because the miners’ defeat ushered in an era in Britain and internationally that remains with us, in which the rights of workers have been rolled back in favour of corporate profit, he says.

“It was not a normal dispute, between an employer and workers,” he argues. “It was a government-created attack on working-class people.”

Guy is encouraged by Labour’s promise of an inquiry into Orgreave, and a review of the way billions of pounds in surpluses in the miners’ pension scheme have been siphoned off by successive governments while many retired miners live in poverty.

But he points to “glaring omissions” in Labour’s programme too, citing first and foremost its refusal to lift the two-child benefit cap that traps hundreds of thousands of children in poverty.

Poverty has been the fate of whole regions of Britain, where nothing replaced the mines when they shut. Tory promises of “levelling-up” proved so much hot air. Is Guy pleased Keir Starmer has begun his premiership by convening a council of regional mayors and promising to devolve power from Westminster?

“It will be good if it’s managed appropriately. Years of trickle-down economics have left us with nothing. The former coal-mining communities are still desperate.

“We need jobs, massive investment in the old mining communities, new infrastructure.” 

Listening to local voices will be key to that — but Starmer hasn’t always appeared sensitive to local opinion. In the north-east in particular, the stitch-up that forced the popular North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll out of the Labour Party still rankles, while chatting to people in the crowds lining the streets as the bands went by that morning, I’d found the name of the new North Durham MP Luke Akehurst, a non-local right-wing factionalist parachuted into a safe seat, was met with consistent hostility.

Is Guy nervous that this indicates Westminster control-freakery will quash local initiative? “I’m not nervous, I’m angry,” he says.

“Those decisions [to remove Driscoll from the mayoralty and impose Akehurst as an MP] were blatantly and absolutely wrong.

“The imposition of Luke Akehurst is laughable, it should never have happened — he has no connection whatever to the north-east. There are plenty of credible candidates who represent those communities.

“The local communities are angry about that, we’ve seen the reaction. He was only able to go to some of the hustings because the ill feeling was so strong.”

If Labour doesn’t stop imposing machine politicians on communities they know nothing about — and Guy says that “if at all possible” Akehurst’s imposition should be reversed even though he is now an MP — then it will lose trust in working-class neighbourhoods and that will drive support for the likes of Reform UK, he says.

Or to independents like Jeremy Corbyn? “Jeremy’s election was fantastic news and it does illustrate that point that locally people want people they know, who have a track record of delivering for their communities.” Labour will indeed see more upsets like that in Islington North unless it changes course, he thinks, but in many areas the risk is that things will swing to the far right.

“I don’t think all those who are voting Reform UK are racists. I think it’s working-class people, in the north-east many traditional Labour voters, who’ve been let down by a party they expected to stand up for them.

“It’s 31 years since we had a coal mine in County Durham. There has been very little investment since then. And the voices of these communities haven’t been heard. It’s a very important reason why local people should have control of who their representatives are, and if Labour is going to bring in people from Oxford to ‘represent’ County Durham in Westminster then we will see more people going off and supporting other parties.”