Pride, health, work experience
Plus governance and scrutiny!
It’s Pride Month, and we are celebrating as a nation in the now-traditional way: by completely losing our shit.
England has spent a lot of time talking about flags recently. What it means to fly a flag. Why it’s important to be allowed to fly whichever flag you want. How everyone will get really upset if people can’t fly their flags anymore.
Then obviously it’s important to make a big show of not flying a particular flag because it isn't the really special one which you really, really like.
This region, of all regions, ought to recognise the value of the politics of solidarity and its place as part of our shared heritage.
It’s not random that when Durham County Council pulled its £2,500 for Durham’s pride celebration, the Durham Miners’ Association (DMA) contributed ten times that amount to back the event.
During the Miners’ Strike, the Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) group spontaneously emerged in response to the state brutality being cast upon the miners, spotting how it mirrored the treatment of gay people.
LGSM raised tens of thousands to support striking miners, and their efforts resulted in the famous headline “perverts support the pits” in The Sun (don’t buy it, don’t read it).
In 1985, the National Union of Mineworkers, along with other unions, voted as a block to make criminalisation of discrimination against lesbian, gay and bisexual people.
Back then, the beating heart of working class communities, in a fight for their own survival, recognised injustice and came down on the side of progress
Now, in 2026 - which is apparently the present, despite all the evidence that history is travelling backwards - on making the decision not to back pride, Durham’s leadership has said the council shouldn’t spend money on ‘political activism’ or ‘politics in fancy dress’.
They are perfectly happy, however, to fund a St George’s Cross-themed roundabout, as the chair of Durham Pride pointed out.
Fancy-dress roundabouts aside, Durham, Gateshead and Sunderland councils backing away from support for Pride events, and Pride Month, flies (that’s a flag pun, you’re welcome) in the face of a long tradition of support, solidarity and acceptance from the communities of the North East.
It gives us a clear and crisp answer to why pride remains important.
Progress is not linear, and it’s not always obvious these days whether the arc of history really does bend towards justice.
What is certainly true is that hard won ground can easily be lost if you don’t defend it - that is why Pride remains important.
Homosexuality was illegal until 1968, was listed in the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Disease until 1990, and was illegal to teach in schools under Section 28 until 2003.
This is not ancient history.
I’m 39 today (HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!), and no one my age received any information or formal pastoral support relating to LGBT+ or until Section 28 was revoked after we’d done our GCSEs.
That is isolating.
It was deliberate. It was political.
The attempts to erase or diminish LGBT+ lives now follow the playbook of the 70s, 80s and 90s, where systematic efforts were made to lock LGBT+ people out of public life - no visibility in education, no understanding in healthcare, no openness in public.
One of the Nolan Principles which govern conduct in public office is objectivity, and local government is supposed to represent everyone in a community.
A refusal to fly a Pride flag, or to back Pride events, sends a clear signal - one heard in communities, and no doubt by those working in these local authorities. It is exclusionary.
There is a direct line between the current public discourse on trans rights, the playbook of the past, and these actions on Pride events.
I find it hard to accept the line that local government should not be backing Pride events because they are political, at the same time as national government is deciding what you should look like and how you should identify when you walk into a public toilet.
LGBT+ lives are inherently political, just as the lives of every member of a minority group are inevitably political, whether they want to be or not.
When the structures of day-to-day life are simply not set up for you, when you face friction and discrimination in every activity, when you carry the constant emotional weight of managing that, then you find yourself being political.
When simply living your life is political, being told to stop being political is nonsense - it’s the same as being told not to exist.
Individuals can decide whether or not they want to back or be part of Pride, but as institutions, local government and public bodies ought to. They have a duty to make sure their services and the mechanisms of democratic engagement are accessible, and to take action to make that obvious.
Anything that makes people think twice about engaging with their local authority is undemocratic.
When it comes to engaging with local people, let’s not forget that in Durham’s case, this is the same administration that got in a right huff about not being invited to the Durham Miners’ Gala last year.
At the time a Reform spokesperson called the DMA “political dinosaurs” and “completely out of touch with their members and the people of County Durham”.
Takes a fossil to know one, I guess.
Whenever I discuss this issue, I always take a moment to look at the numbers.
At the last Census, 1.56% of people in the North East identified as gay or lesbian, with 1.19% as bisexual. But, nationally, more than 7% of people chose not to answer the question.
Fewer than 0.5% of people chose to identify themselves as trans or non-binary.
We are talking about a very small proportion of the population, and a significant number - some of which we can infer from the decision not to answer - who do not feel comfortable declaring their identity.
The public has a tendency to grossly overestimate the size of minority groups, especially when the political or news agenda turns its spotlight on them.
A study in the US found the public estimating trans people made up 12% of the adult population - which would be around 40 million people, or the whole of California.
It's closer to 1%, which is still an Oklahoma-full, but not in the same ballpark. (Do they play baseball in Oklahoma? Probably, right?)
Overestimating the size of a population by a whole scale of magnitude tends to diminish the vulnerability of the groups we’re talking about.
Make no mistake, there remains the need for visible community.
Until everyone is embraced and lives are celebrated, we'll keep needing Pride.
119 year wait for a home?
The Guardian ran a piece this week on social housing waiting lists, and some research from Shelter which found that - with a waiting list nationally sat at 1.3 million, and fewer than 13,000 new social housing units built last year - it would take 119 years to clear the list.
Good news for our great-grandchildren at least.
In the North East, the social housing waiting list is 63,000, which is equivalent to about 23% of the 271,000 total local authority and housing association properties in the region…so, we’d need to build that proportion again on top of what we have to clear it.
In reality, we tick along building around 2,500 affordable homes in the region each year - with around 400 of those for social rent last year.
There’s stuff happening to try to change that - not least a big ol’ chunk of cash aimed at bringing sites forward and looking at brownfield opportunities - but still a long way to go.
Newcastle Helix - future of work experience
Newcastle Helix is the innovation district in the centre of the city, and one of the things they are innovating is work experience.
It’s a terrible system we have for that currently, and one which solidifies social divides by far too often requiring family connections to open doors.
I am guilty of that, given that I have a sixth former with me this week, and that connection and request came through my network.
While I am mostly exhausting myself trying not to be boring, they have been quietly cracking on with things and taking it all in their stride.
One thing we’ve talked about is the expected path for A Level students, and the assumption that you will go on to university, and that anything else is a waste. That ignores the fact that there are degree apprenticeships and technical and vocational qualifications which deserve parity of esteem.
Work experience opens young people's lives to the possibilities, and often brings them into contact with people who have not followed that conveyor belt.
I'd hazard a guess, too, that it's unusual for someone on work experience to spend time with a freelancer. It's a very different working life I lead now to the one I had five, ten or 15 years ago, and one which no careers adviser would ever guide you towards.
Anyway, more reflections on that next week, and back to Helix.
The team there have produced a film on a programme they ran where young people got a chance to sample a range of businesses and sectors across the multi-occupancy Helix site - they are calling it a ‘work experience safari’.
Everything in its right place
The think tank Localis has published a new paper looking at what is required of the organisations and practices around devolution to make it a success.
I was interviewed as part of their gathering of views, and the researcher/author was very generous in allowing me to chatter on about governance structures and why I was worried about everything risking getting too chummy as everyone sort of agreed with each other.
Some of that was clearly on other people's lists too, in that the report makes recommendations around governance and the connection between directly elected mayors and councils and communities, and on better training and robustness of scrutiny committees.
Speaking of scrutiny
I (and my work experience associate) spent some time yesterday at the first cabinet meeting of the newly renamed North East Mayoral Strategic Authority, which was also the first since May's local elections and so featured some new faces.
It was an end of year agenda, with confirmation of new portfolios for the cabinet members - largely linked to areas of interest or economic strength on their patches - and time spent reviewing scrutiny and risk management and so on.
The authority's annual performance report was also on the agenda, which includes some impressive headlines, and emphasises the pace and breadth of what's being covered.
That pace of effort was referenced a few times during the meeting, and I think was possibly a bit bewildering for the newbies in particular.
It was difficult to get a sense of the personalities involved, as a number of the local authority leaders sent substitutes, but with the exception of Newcastle's deputy leader, the only ones who spoke were long standing members. I don't recall Gateshead, Sunderland or South Tyneside saying anything at all.
There's a degree of choreography that comes with formal meetings like this one, and people often deal with the procedure-driven nature of them by working out in advance where they are going to speak up and insert themselves into the discussion. Some definitely did that, making sure they get their names in the minutes and their points across.
Learning that takes time, especially if the public sector isn't your natural habitat, and if you're busy trying to get your head around other aspects of a difficult job.
All of which is to say the dynamic which will emerge for this new-look cabinet remains unclear.
What I'm up to this week…
Loads of meetings and calls, catching up with people in the name of work experience
Insights North East’s annual conference today - come over and say hello if you're there too!
A couple of education-based focus groups as part of a project on the future of work
Prep ahead of wider community engagement involved in that project
Prep for a couple of speaking slots I’ve got coming up next week
That's it for now, thanks for reading everyone.
If you need me, you'll find me on arlen@arlenpettitt.co.uk.