UnHerd76%
What ‘Pride’ tells us about progressive prejudice 79%
By David Littlefair97%
7/17/2026, 11:01:04 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 39 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Anecdotal, and Biased Writer Voice, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 34.5% saturation with 561 hits. Analysis detected 3,732 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,628 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 71.9% and a BS Rank of 79% (3,688 of 17,595 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 79.00% of the article peer group.
“Dai, your gays have arrived!”
yells Gwen, a pensioner, as she opens the door of Dulais Valley Lodge in the coalmining heartlands of South Wales.
A group of young Londoners stand before her.
They call themselves LGSM or “Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners”.
They have descended upon the mining village to lend their solidarity during the strikes of 1983 since they, too, are a group whom Margaret Thatcher dubbed “the enemy within”.
It’s one of a number of lines that makes its way from Stephen Beresford’s 2014 film <em>Pride</em> into the fabulous new stage adaptation at the National Theatre. <span style="font-weight: 400">Beresford and his co-writer, Matthew Warchus, have transformed the classic Brit-flick portraying the then-unlikely union between working-class communities and metropolitan progressives during the miners’ strike into a piece of bombastic and campy musical theater.
It</span> lands in a political milieu markedly different from the 2014 film — and certainly from LGSM’s Eighties heyday.
In recent years, the story recounted quite faithfully in <em>Pride</em> has become a political fable of the kind beloved on the Left.
Like the Jarrow Crusade, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo Massacre, the Paris Commune, and the Spanish Civil War before it, it is a somewhat melancholic story of a social movement that is said to have succeeded in history’s long vista — in spite of near-term defeat.
But where <em>Pride</em>’s story differs from the parables of the Left canon is in the split fortunes of the LGSM coalition.
Britain now is a far-cry from the widespread homophobia of the Eighties, whose officials responded so shamefully to the HIV epidemic.
When the young today are told of how Manchester’s chief constable James Anderton — “God’s copper” — described gay men affected by HIV as “<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-61349570" target="_blank" rel="noopener">swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making</a>”, they are rightly disgusted.
Thatcherism failed to suppress gay rights.
Within a generation, her Conservative successors would go on to denounce Section 28 and legalize gay marriage, David Cameron declaring this — in an admittedly small pool — to be “one of the things of which I’m proudest”.
“It is a somewhat melancholic story of a social movement that is said to have succeeded in history’s long vista — in spite of near-term defeat.”
But Thatcher and her heirs did succeed in shuttering British heavy industry and neutering the political weight of organized labor.
Britain’s breakneck deindustrialization process was faster than any other nation; even the collapsing Soviet Union wasn’t so extreme.
It is now a country where skilled manual work has become a niche career choice.
Outside London are countless communities that have never recovered from the offshoring of their local industry.
It’s hard not to wonder how LGSM’s visionary founding member Mark Ashton would feel about how things turned out.
Mischievous as well as driven, as a young man he spent a six-month stint in the King’s Cross Conservative Club undercover in drag.
Played by Jhon Lumsden in <em>Pride</em>, he radiates a manic confrontational energy, simultaneously pithy, erudite, roguish and possessed of a rare moral clarity.
When asked why a group of gay people should come to the aid of people who persecuted them growing up, he phlegmatically retorts: “Because miners dig for coal, which produces power, which allows gay people like you to dance to Bananarama till three o’clock in the morning.”
Ashton instinctively connected social liberty and class struggle.
Millions of Brits were gay and millions worked in industry, and it was clear how contributions to the economy and social life of Britain linked the two.
It would be difficult to draw the same threads together today.
How does one link a piebald economy of casualized work, AI data centers, Deliveroo riders, vape shops and photovoltaic cell installers with the remaining contested battlegrounds of social liberty?
It isn’t quite so clear how each of us contributes to the life of the other anymore.
Still, it is worth challenging the narrative that has emerged, particularly since the Brexit referendum, that these two core components of the old Labour vote — the urban progressives and the traditional working class — are somehow fundamentally opposed.
The commonplace bigotry that I encountered at comprehensive school in a former pit community in the Nineties is dying.
Indeed, polling by the likes of YouGov consistently disproves the stereotype of the bigoted, provincial “gammon” who has bewitched progressives since Brexit.
People living in Britain’s social mobility cold-spots, characterized by the ghosts of production lines and shipyards, are no more likely to feel animosity towards the non-straight population than people anywhere else.
Where homophobia is more prevalent is within religious communities, which leaves the modern progressive with difficult scales to balance, as those people often don’t resemble the middle-aged men of post-industrial England who have become their Ur-baddie.
I saw the heartbreaking effects of this homophobia first-hand in 2014 — the year the movie <em>Pride</em> was first released.
I was a key-worker in various homeless hostels in London.
One was for young people in Sydenham where roughly half of my young charges were the disowned teenage children of homophobic parents — all of whom had been taught by their religious leaders that their children’s sexuality made them evil.
Each case file would come with a letter from a parent containing words to the effect of: “I do not support my child’s lifestyle.
They are no longer my child.”
This social and familial ostracization used to be a common part of the gay experience in Britain; activists like Ashton fought so hard to overcome it.
The continuation of such attitudes within highly religious communities is a reality that most modern progressives mostly prefer to ignore.
When, in 2019, a school in Birmingham was subject to a months-long campaign of picketing by Muslim parents outraged at a curriculum encouraging acceptance of LGBT+ relationships, most progressives seemed keen to shuffle the episode under the carpet.
False claims that mimicked the worst of post-war-era bigotry whirled around social media: the school had a “paedophile agenda”, staff were “teaching children to masturbate”, and children were “being indoctrinated” into homosexuality.
The campaigner Amir Ahmed said that children were being “conditioned to accept (gay relationships) as a normal way of life”, while the Imam Mullah Bahm pronounced the school’s headteacher was a “<em>shatani</em>” (a devil) who “needed to be broken”.
There is little sign at present that Left progressives are prepared to challenge such bigotry today; those who did turn up, tying messages of solidarity to the school gates, later went to the police after being pelted with eggs by the protestors.
If Zack Polanski, whose Green Party is buoyed by a defecting Muslim vote after Labour’s Gaza failings, is following LGSM’s lead of building solidarity partly as means to a cultural end, he’s doing so very quietly.
Meanwhile, <em>Tribune</em>, the magazine built by pioneering feminists like Labour MPs Ellen Wilkinson and Barbara Castle, is now owned by the same religious-conservative businessman whose Islam Channel has been fined by Ofcom for, among other things, advocating acquiescing to marital rape as a religious duty.
In this light, the ethical ethos that Ashton and his comrades held themselves to seems almost alien.
LGSM were willing to put in hard yards to convince others they were on their side.
Today, according to the pollsters More In Common (and anyone else who has spent any time in progressive circles), the group denoted as “Progressive Activists” are now the most insular citizens in Britain.
They almost exclusively socialize with people who agree with them — and they are also the ones most likely to think those who don’t agree with them are morally deficient.
Rather than drive hundreds of miles with donations for the skeptical but depressed villages of Britain, contemporary progressives stick to their own.
They are the type to respond to national news of racial tensions in the depressed estates of Teesside by organizing a night-time vigil on the other side of the country in Walthamstow.
They write, read and display dense, self-flagellating books about the difficult and intellectually taxing work of “not being a racist”.
They swap Labour councillors for Green councillors in cities already full of Low-Traffic Neighborhoods and car-use penalties, reacting with shock when the small council budget allocations that aren’t already taken by elderly care don’t allow much in the way of revolutionary change.
In many ways, this is a politics of resigned indignation.
One that has given up on Britain’s potential and instead built a members-only club inside of her major cities.
The Mark Ashton of 1983 would surely feel a sense of disappointment.
Progressivism may hold the kind of cultural dominance that previous generations could only have dreamed of — but it has also become an insular subculture.
Outsiders are, if not the enemy, irrelevant.
<em>Pride</em>’s relevance today is in the contrast it sets out between LGSM and the modern activist.
Rather than cultivating the necessary humility to find common purpose between groups of people, a culture of social media-incentivized extremism and righteous indignation has turned many on the Left into sniffy inquisitors, not entirely convinced that the poor are good enough people to be worth helping.
The National Theatre is <em>Pride</em>’s second stop after a stint in Cardiff.
It isn’t clear whether the play will then go on tour, but it’s worth noting that if it does, it’s unlikely to visit the parts of Britain permanently broken by the end of the miners’ strike.
Though it is a play that would be ideal for neglected England, it might be almost exclusively applauded by an audience of comfortable Londoners.
I wonder whether that is what Ashton would have wanted.
***
<em>Pride is at the National Theatre until 12 September. <a href="https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/fridayrush/#_gl=1*1kq9f93*_gcl_au*NDc0NTE4MTI2LjE3ODM1ODk1NzQ." target="_blank" rel="noopener">Friday Rush</a> tickets are available.</em>
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.