In the lovely new British film Pride, a busload of London gay activists heads for a Welsh village to support the coal miners in their 1984 strike. The first evening in the community hall is awkward but the activists and the miners become unlikely best friends. By the end, a bunch of Welsh miners’ wives are having the night of their lives in a London leather bar.
Both groups had a gruesome 1980s. A gay friend who lived in London during the Aids epidemic remembers that he was always burying his friends (because their families had rejected them) and inheriting all their possessions.
But later the gay community recovered, whereas miners didn’t. While gay marriage spreads worldwide, the western working class keeps losing status. This reflects the contrasting fates of two political ideas. “Rights” – for gay people, women and other suppressed groups – are in the ascendant. By contrast, the old notion of uplifting the working class en masse has died. This class now gets dismissed as an embarrassing relic of the industrial era, like a disused factory.