It won’t change overnight, but now 140,000 miners know that there are other causes and other problems. “Now we will pin your badge on us, we will support you. Meant to undermine the striking miners and their new found allies, it backfired and only served to strengthen support from the broader community against the “Iron Lady”.Īt the concert, David Donovan, a South Wales miner, said in a speech to the miners’ new comrades: “You have worn our badge ’Coal not Dole’ and you know what harassment means, as we do.
It was the Sun newspaper which at the time described the concert as a “Pits and Perverts” function. One of the highlights of the fund raising events was undoubtedly the “Pits and Perverts” concert at the Electric Ballroom where Bronski Beat headed the bill and where £5,650 was raised for the miners. The activists saw the miners as another group who were seemingly being ostracised by society, particularly after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher labelled the strikers “the enemy within”.īy December 1984, the London group had collected over £11,000 by a mixture of pub, club and street collections, benefits, parties and other events and were able to donate a minibus to a miners’ support group in the Dulais Valley near Neath. Before the titanic struggle between miners and Margaret Thatcher, it would have been hard to imagine a colliers’ minibus running around South Wales with the slogan on its doors pronouncing : “This vehicle was donated by the Lesbians’ and Gay men’s miners’ support group.”īut in the summer of 1984, a group of gay and lesbian activists in London, at a time when the AIDS issue was seeing prejudices come to the fore, decided to raise money to support the families of striking miners.