Durham Pride came back bigger and better this year, and it did so without a single penny of council funding, after Reform UK took control of the council and cut it entirely. What happened next is one of those stories that reminds you why community matters more than politics.

The trade union movement stepped in. The Durham Miners' Association, whose famous Gala has filled the city streets with banners and brass bands for over a century, helped anchor a solidarity effort that kept the event alive and, by all accounts, made it better than it has ever been. There is something genuinely stirring about that. The miners' movement has a long history of showing up for people the establishment would rather ignore, and this year they showed up for Durham's LGBTQ+ community in exactly that spirit.

Reform's decision to pull the funding was a political act dressed up as fiscal responsibility, and nobody was really fooled. When a council controlled by a party whose candidates have a well-documented record of hostile remarks about LGBTQ+ people decides that Pride is the thing to cut, the message is not subtle. It says: you are not our priority. It says: your visibility costs us something we would rather not spend. The community heard that message clearly, and its response was to grow louder.

That response matters because it is so human. Pride events are not simply parties. They are the places where a teenager who has never met another trans person suddenly realises they are not alone. They are where someone who came out at fifty, after decades of hiding, stands in a crowd and feels ordinary in the best possible way. They are where families bring their children and show them, without words, that different is fine and love is wide. Cut the funding and you are not just cancelling a day out. You are telling those people that the council would rather they stayed invisible.

The solidarity that saved Durham Pride has a particular texture worth noticing. The union movement and the LGBTQ+ community have not always marched together, but when they have, the results have been remarkable. The story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners during the 1984 strike is now well known, partly because of the film Pride, and the bond it forged was real and lasting. What happened in Durham this year feels like a continuation of that tradition: two groups of people who know what it is to be dismissed, underfunded, and politically inconvenient, finding each other useful and finding each other good.

Reform will doubtless frame their funding decision as a matter of council finances. It was not. Councils make choices about what they value, and this council chose to signal that it does not value its LGBTQ+ residents. The community's answer, which was to raise the money elsewhere, find new partners, and put on an event bigger than any before it, is the only answer worth giving. You cannot suppress people who are proud of who they are and proud of each other.

What I find genuinely moving about this is not the defiance, though the defiance is admirable. It is the ordinary joy underneath it. People dressing up, bringing their kids, seeing their friends, dancing in the street, feeling recognised. That is what was at stake, and that is what was saved. Not an ideology, not a political statement, just people being allowed to be themselves in public, with their city around them.

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Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the people whose lives she has spent her career trying to make easier.