The early morning mist veils the grassy slopes below the town of Stanley as a smartly dressed brass band assembles outside a local clubhouse.
Behind the band members, four stocky men raise two brightly painted banners on 10-foot poles – just as their forebears in this community of miners have done for over 150 years.
The start of the parade, part of the Durham Miners’ Gala established in 1871, begins with a lament. The band sounds a slow, mournful pulse of horns, playing the opening bars of “Gresford,” a hymn composed to honor the men who died after the 1934 explosion at the Gresford Colliery in north Wales. The 30 or so people gathered outside the Stanley hall bow their heads.
Why We Wrote This
Populists often gain traction in communities that feel left behind. In Durham County, England, many voters are finding common cause outside the current creaking political order.
“Some people say we focus too much on our mining heritage, but we ain’t got much else,” says Darren McMahon, whose family arrived from Ireland in the 19th century to dig coal. Today, his two sons, Sam and Joe, are bringing one of Stanley’s banners to the gala – another generation carrying the torch of tradition.
Along with other men and women of Stanley, they are headed for what may be the biggest labor union gathering in Europe, held annually in the university city of Durham, the county seat of coal country in northeast England.
The village pub opened early for breakfast, and as the brass band switches to playing upbeat pop songs and the mist starts to lift, the townsfolk, young and old, cheer the passing banners.
By tradition, each mining village brings a banner and a band to the gala. Previous generations would march the 8 miles from Stanley to Durham on foot. Today, participants march through Stanley toward two waiting buses that will take them the rest of the way.
The communities that surround Durham are still defined by the legacy of coal and labor organizing. Most families have a connection to the pits: a father, or grandfather, who went down the mines.
It’s a region also known for its long history as a bastion of left-wing English politics, forged by union activism and socialist idealism. For nearly a century, the region voted reliably for Britain’s Labour Party. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair grew up in Durham County and represented a local constituency.
Residents joke that you could pin a red rosette, in Labour’s traditional color, on a donkey and win an election.
The coal mines that powered Britain’s industrial revolution, though, are long gone. Many closed in the 1950s and 1960s. Others shut in the 1980s under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose protracted battle with mining unions made her a folk devil in pit villages. The last coal mine in Durham County, in operation for nearly two centuries, closed in 2020.
By then, however, Labour’s strength here had already begun to erode. After experiencing decades of decline in mining and other industries, as well as the failure of successive governments to revitalize working-class communities, locals are turning to populists on the right and left – those who promise to break with a creaking political order.
The revolt from Labour in this region is part of a larger political movement roiling other democracies around the world. More and more, voters are challenging previously established norms of governance.
As in the United States, the United Kingdom is used to being governed by two broad-based parties on the center-left and center-right. That consensus no longer holds.
“Labour and Conservatives have difficulty holding their [intraparty] coalitions together,” says Paul Taggart, a professor of politics at the University of Sussex. “People are less shackled to traditional political affiliations.”
And the biggest winner so far is Reform UK, an insurgent party on the right led by Nigel Farage, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump’s and a pro-Brexit firebrand.
Last year, Reform UK polled behind the two main parties in national elections won by Labour, which formed a government under Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Then came local elections held across England this past May. This time, Reform turned the tables, winning control of 10 regional authorities.
One of those was Durham’s County Council, in which once-dominant Labour slumped to a distant third place. In Stanley, half of the councilors now wear Reform’s turquoise rosette instead of Labour’s red.
This has created ruptures in the traditional bedrock of the U.K.’s left-wing politics. During the campaign leading up to May’s elections, the left-leaning organizers of the miners’ gala urged voters to reject Reform candidates.
Tensions escalated after the elections. Alan Mardghum, the general secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association, said Reform officials would never be invited to the gala. “I wouldn’t share a platform with any of them,” he told a radio station. For their part, Reform UK leaders dismissed the miners association leadership as “political dinosaurs” who were out of touch with their Reform-voting members.
Indeed, just as Mr. Trump persuaded the union rank and file in blue states to disregard their Democratic-aligned leadership, so Reform has pitched itself to working-class voters in Durham as an alternative to progressive politics-as-usual.
Opinion polls suggest that Reform has the wind at its back. Were a U.K. election held tomorrow, Reform could form the biggest party in Parliament.
It’s a seismic shift. And it speaks to a deepening crisis of faith in center-left politics in blue-collar communities across Europe, as voters feel abandoned by globalization and unheard by political elites.
“Working-class people have been taken for granted for many years in their support for Labour,” says Eddie Dempsey, leader of RMT, a national union for transport workers. “That’s been broken over the last 20 years plus, slowly but surely.”
The result is the march of Reform through “left-behind” towns like Stanley and others that are “crying out for change,” says Mr. Dempsey. “That’s why people are going to Reform. They’ve had enough of the status quo.”
Key issue for Reform UK voters: Immigration
The day before the miners’ gala, Gary Talbot walked through Stanley to visit his father. His route took him past redbrick public housing from the postwar era, the high-water mark of Labour rule when it created the National Health Service and other social programs.
Mr. Talbot, a nightclub security manager, stopped in the shade at Lenin Terrace, which abuts Marx Crescent – names that reflect the region’s earlier socialist ambitions.
He voted for Reform UK in 2024. “It’s mainly about all the illegal immigrants coming,” Mr. Talbot says, referring to asylum-seekers crossing by boat from France. Nobody is assessing the security risk, he says. “You could have rapists and murderers coming into the country.”
Immigration is a key issue for Reform voters. It was also front and center in the 2016 referendum on European Union membership, in which a majority of voters in the northeast chose to leave the EU. Labour and Conservative leaders had campaigned for Britain to stay in the EU, so the result triggered turmoil within both parties. It scrambled the electoral map, particularly in Labour strongholds.
“People had been told not to do it, and they did the opposite,” says Simon Henig, a Labour politician and former leader of Durham council, of the Brexit vote.
This led to a broader questioning of political loyalties. When Labour lawmakers resisted Brexit and called for a second referendum, the ties came loose, says Mr. Henig, who stepped down this year after 26 years as a councilor. “The northeast voted to leave. Labour wanted to stay.”
In 2019, the beneficiary was the Conservative Party led by Boris Johnson, who consolidated the pro-Brexit vote. He flipped once-impregnable Labour seats in the northeast, including Mr. Blair’s former constituency. About a month later, the U.K. left the EU.
In September 2022, Mr. Johnson was out, undone by COVID-19 lockdown scandals. The Conservatives then cycled through two more leaders before the 2024 elections in which the party lost more than 200 seats in Parliament, including seats in Durham that Mr. Johnson had flipped. It was the party’s worst electoral result since 1832.
Labour won a comfortable majority despite receiving only 34% of votes cast. But the biggest surprise was Reform UK led by Mr. Farage, who had decided to run only a month before the elections and finished with a 14% share.
Mr. Henig noticed another trend: Irregular voters were drawn to Mr. Farage’s anti-establishment politics. In an era of information overload and voter apathy, cutting through the noise to turn out people who might not vote otherwise is crucial.
“Reform picked up people who haven’t voted at previous elections,” says Mr. Henig, who teaches politics at the University of Sunderland.
The success of far-right populism in Europe
In the U.S., turning out voters who stayed home in past elections was part of Mr. Trump’s winning formula in 2024. Mr. Farage is often compared to Mr. Trump, whom he befriended in 2016 during the U.S. presidential campaign. Both are twice-divorced, ebullient businessmen turned political disrupters who prefer campaign rallies and phone-ins to detailed policy debates.
But analysts say Reform UK has more in common with right-wing parties in Europe than with Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement.
These parties vary in their policy platforms but share an animus toward political and financial elites deemed out of touch with working-class voters, who haven’t shared in the spoils of economic growth and may feel slighted for their conservative values.
From Durham’s coal country and France’s factory towns to Germany’s Ruhr region, steady employment in manufacturing and mining has given way to jobs that provide less security and dignity. Wages have grown slowly, if at all. Mass immigration is seen as a threat, not as an opportunity. Voters feel a lack of control over their lives and the wider society.
“You have an emotional reaction to feeling left out and unrecognized,” says Mabel Berezin, a sociologist who directs Cornell University’s Institute for European Studies. “It’s not that people have suddenly become nationalist. … The economic needs of populations are not being met.”
Votes don’t always translate into power. In France, Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally party has the largest share of lawmakers, while Germany’s Alternative for Germany nearly doubled its federal vote share in February’s elections, polling second behind the center-right Christian Democrats. In both countries, centrists have combined forces to box out the far right.
Yet other populists have taken power. A far-right party in the Netherlands won the most seats in a 2023 election and formed a four-party government led by a retired security official, though the coalition fell apart in June. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, has led a coalition government since 2022.
A key difference between Europe’s populist right and Mr. Trump’s Republican Party is economic policy. In Europe, there is greater support for welfare programs and less zeal for limited government.
Mr. Farage, a former commodities trader and self-described Thatcherite, used to frame Brexit as a bonfire of EU regulations that would let markets rip. Today, he favors the nationalization of British steel and defends fuel subsidies for retirees against government cuts.
Gawain Towler, a longtime associate of Mr. Farage, says his souring on capitalism as a cure-all comes from Mr. Farage’s years of campaigning in Durham and other areas that depend on government programs.
“There’s probably no politician in Britain who’s spent more time in the most deprived parts of the country,” he says.
Now, Reform has a platform for Mr. Farage to show that his party, which has only five members of Parliament and a thinly staffed organization, can be trusted to run the country. Local councilors are also the boots on the ground in national elections and a talent pool for parties to recruit candidates.
Among voters, says Mr. Towler, “There’s a feeling, ‘Look, we don’t necessarily think [Reform] has got all the answers, but these so-called professional politicians have made such a bloody pig’s ear of everything. Why not give them a chance?’”
Young Reform UK leaders begin to govern
It’s a sunny day, but little sunlight penetrates the wood-paneled chamber inside Durham’s dilapidated county hall. Members of the Reform-run executive committee sit on a wooden platform.
This public meeting is only the second since Reform took control of a county with about 535,000 residents and a budget of £1.3 billion (about $1.7 billion). On the agenda is a review of finances and capital spending, which had grown under the previous council run by a centrist coalition.
Reform campaigned on a pledge to curb waste and cut spending on climate change and other “woke” policies. It has since set up a DOGE unit modeled on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
After the meeting is called into session, the county’s finance director runs through the costs of a $88 million property tax exemption program. Of the 52,000 recipients, 62% are working-age adults with low incomes in towns like Stanley.
He ends with a range of options to allow the council to collect more from these households in property taxes, one of the few ways that cash-strapped local authorities in England can raise money.
On the platform, Darren Grimes, the deputy council leader, is waiting his turn to speak. A hairstylist turned Brexit activist and conservative TV news host, Mr. Grimes wears a sky-blue tie and tailored dark suit. At age 32, he’s the youngest member of the committee. (In Warwickshire, another Reform-run county, the council leader is 19 years old.)
Mr. Grimes agrees that capping exemptions in the future for working-age adults would ensure “all our residents have a financial stake in, and make a contribution to, the council,” he says. But, he adds, looking up from his notes, it’s not a decision to be made lightly, “especially not for a lad from Stanley.”
In an interview, Mr. Grimes says his upbringing in Stanley, where he was raised by a single mother, shapes his politics.
“I know what it’s like to struggle. I know what it is like to feel that the [government] seems to take more and more and more, but you receive less and less and less.”
He now represents a part of the former mining region where he grew up. His show on GB News made him a celebrity on the right, but some voters had never heard of him, he says. “I had to convince them in a very normal, ordinary way: knocking on doors, saying who I am, what I’m about.”
Reform is focused on “commonsense” policies that deliver value to voters, not on “virtue-signaling” climate initiatives, says Mr. Grimes.
If it succeeds in Durham, he says, voters throughout the country will notice, and 2029 – the likely next U.K. election – “starts to look pretty exciting for British politics. So, yeah, the pressure is on.”
The far left turns its back on Labour
After storing his rolled-up banner in the bus hold, Sam McMahon climbs aboard and wedges himself into a double seat. Four years ago, he caused a stir when he turned down a coveted place at the University of Cambridge after being elected as a Labour town councilor in Stanley.
He switched instead to Durham University so he could study while serving as deputy council leader. His father, Darren, runs a nonprofit community hub in Stanley that provides food, clothing, and services to homeless and vulnerable residents – including asylum-seekers.
But Sam McMahon has since turned his back on Labour. A student of politics, he sees space on the left for a new party that rejects the welfare cuts of the current Labour government, taxes the rich more, and stands firmly against Israel’s actions in Gaza. “We need an alternative,” he says.
That alternative is coming: Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader turned independent member of Parliament, recently announced the launch of a new, as-yet-unnamed left-wing party.
Populists on the left have been gaining ground, too. In France, Germany, and other countries, they are attacking free trade and corporations while promising to tackle climate change and social injustices.
Mr. Corbyn is one of the guest speakers at this year’s miners’ gala, along with the Palestinian ambassador to the U.K., Mr. Dempsey, and other leftist labor leaders. By tradition, invitees gather on a hotel balcony to watch the parade before addressing the marchers and spectators who gather at a local race course, next to a field that offers fairground rides.
Tens of thousands of attendees throng the city, some late into the night; in pubs and bars, revelers start early. This is also a tradition: A 1928 report on the gala in The New York Times ran under a subhead, “They Drink 256,000 Pints of Beer, Dance All Day and Depart Without a Single Row.”
Yet, while the gala’s speakers are firmly on the left, steeped in socialist ideals and progressive rhetoric, not everyone shares their politics.
Julie Prested, who works in eldercare, is a regular attendee who sees the parade as a way to honor generations of miners. She votes Reform because of its opposition to illegal immigration.
“I’m not racist, but look at the people who are coming into the country,” she says.
The paradox of Reform’s success in local elections in England – next year is the turn of Wales and Scotland – is that its campaign was driven by national issues, particularly immigration, that counties don’t control. Nor is Durham an immigration hub: Ninety-five percent of residents are U.K.-born.
Some asylum-seekers who arrive in southern England have been rehoused in Durham towns with cheap housing, a practice that Reform wants to end.
The elder Mr. McMahon says immigrants face racism in Stanley because residents aren’t used to seeing nonwhite faces. He blames absent landlords who subdivide houses for asylum-seekers and profit from government contracts.
Reform’s anti-immigrant rhetoric isn’t helping, he says. But he gets why frustrations are building. “We’ve been left behind. A lot of people are looking around for someone to blame.”
As Reform has surged in the polls, other parties have tried to compete with tougher messages and bolder promises on immigration, crime, and other issues. Among Conservatives, the threat of Reform feels existential; it lost nearly 700 councilors in the May elections.
But trying to outbid populists is unwise, says James Cleverly, a former Conservative foreign secretary. Voters are weary of “bold words without competent action,” he told a recent think tank meeting in London, explaining why the Conservatives lost power in 2024.
He said the onus is now on Reform to demonstrate that its councils can oversee care homes, repair roads, collect trash, and find money to pay for it all.
“Local government is a bit of government that people feel most intimately. … When governments get stuff like that wrong, people notice and people respond,” Mr. Cleverly said.
Historic union gala excludes Reform UK
Back at the gala, there’s no sign of any Reform politicians. Before the event, Mr. Grimes had chided the Durham Miners’ Association for excluding the party, saying that as the grandson of a miner he felt personally hurt. In a video, he accused Mr. Mardghum, the general secretary, of “cos-playing Durham miners of the past” to determine “who counts as ‘working-class.’”
Behind the speaker’s lectern at the gala, Mr. Mardghum starts his speech with a blistering attack on Mr. Starmer for “betraying” Labour voters by trying to restrict disability benefits.
Then he takes aim at Reform. He never banned Reform members from attending, he insists, but refused to give its officials a platform to speak because they didn’t share the association’s values. “They can march if they want. That’s their prerogative. That’s democracy,” he tells the crowd.
In an interview, Mr. Mardghum, who worked as a miner until his pit closed in 1993, cites Mr. Farage’s past support for mine closures that, he says, belies the Reform leader’s claim to speak for mining communities.
“The things that we hold sacred, he doesn’t care about, and by implication, his party don’t care about,” he says, calling himself a “proud socialist.”
The gala is not simply a celebration of mining heritage, he says. The U.K. has to choose what political future it wants.
“It’s about reflecting on the past, celebrating the past, and looking to a brighter future and making a better world for our kids, for our grandkids.”
