Dear readers — we open today’s newsletter on a solemn note: They’ve done it again.
We refer of course to the publication of this article, about the difference between capital and revenue funding for councils, published on Sunday by the Manchester Evening News, which I’m sure we’ve all read. It’s useful information to have, but unfortunately once again the MEN are pretending to have produced exclusive, premium content, and are trying to charge for it, when in reality this is produced by a Local Democracy Reporter: A scheme paid for by all BBC-license fee players.
We promised a few weeks ago that we would continue to publish all ‘MEN Premium’ pieces that the public have actually already paid for, for free, on our website, to show you there is nothing premium about this. For a few weeks they stopped doing it but, presumably thinking our heads were turned, they’re back at it.
And on a more positive note! Like an older brother awaiting the birth of a new sibling, minus all the jealousy and feared loss of motherly attention, we are proud to see our new Leeds sister title preparing to spring from the womb. It needs 500 pledged members to launch, and currently has 280, so if you’re a Mill-reader who also has ties to or an interest in Leeds, then you can help us cut the umbilical cord by clicking here.
This week’s weather
Tuesday 🌥️ Dry & mostly sunny with night winds. Max 12°c.
Wednesday 🌥️ Dry & mild with sunny spells. Breezy. Max 14°c.
Thursday 🌦️ Mild with bright spells, but turning wet into the evening. Max 14°c
Friday 🌥️Much fresher with patchy cloudy & sunny spells. Breezy. Max 10°c.
Weekend 🌥️ Mostly dry with plenty of sunshine & light winds. Temperatures will peak in low double figures
The MEN are back at it
Millers who signed up to our free list following our by-election coverage (and a warm welcome to all 1169 of you) will perhaps not yet be aware of the war we waged earlier this year with the Manchester Evening News.
The MEN had not long launched their ‘Premium’ service — a £4.99-a-month subscription that gets you content made “exclusively for [their] subscribers”. The problem was that a significant number of these articles were actually written by Local Democracy Reporters, funded by our TV license fees, and available to all local newspapers for free — including The Mill.
So, in January, we vowed that every time they tried to pass off journalism that you’ve already paid for as exclusive content (and tried to make you pay for it again) we’d publish that same article ourselves, for free. At the time, the MEN’s editor Sarah Lester said “LDRs are managed, commissioned, and their copy edited by the MEN desk,” but the fact remains their work is funded by the public, and is meant to be freely available.
Since then we’ve not caught them at it — until yesterday, when they published a handy LDR-penned explainer on the difference between capital and revenue funding for councils. Save yourselves a fiver, you can read that for free here.
That being said — if you want genuine, high-quality journalism that you can’t get for free anywhere else, you should consider becoming a Mill subscriber. For £8.95 a month you’ll get the best reporting and writing that Manchester has to offer — straight to your inbox, four days a week.
Gallagher, Osbourne, Lipa, Burnham?
The Brit Awards were hosted in Manchester over the weekend, the first time the ceremony has taken place outside of London in its almost 50-year history. Deansgate train station was renamed Olivia Deansgate — after the singer who took home four awards on the night — and figures from Manchester’s musical past were variously honoured and ridiculed. Predictably, much of the night’s schtick was built on harking back to Manchester’s 90s hey day and inferring many parts of the city are still impoverished and crime-ridden. And, equally predictably, people are whinging about that. The after party was at Soho House, Mark Ronson was on the decks, Dean was there, and Andy Burnham was living it up with Dua Lipa, Skepta and Noel Gallagher. Absent, shockingly, were the Mill team. But lucky for us, or perhaps the Brits, next year’s ceremony is being hosted here too. We expect our social stars will have risen to the kind of dizzying heights that warrant an invite by then, so we’ll bring you the insider gossip in 2027.
‘A victory for cheating’ — or so says Farage
As Hannah Spencer takes her seat in the House of Commons today as the new MP for Gorton and Denton, Reform UK continues to cry foul play. On Friday, the day after the count, allegations were made by the group Democracy Volunteers of ‘family voting’, which is where one member of a family dictates how others cast their ballot. In the aftermath of his candidate Matt Goodwin’s loss, party leader Nigel Farage claimed — with minimal evidence — that the result was a “victory for cheating”. Democracy Volunteers published a report on the night of the count, saying they had witnessed “concerningly high” amounts of apparent family-voting, giving a figure of 12% of voters being involved (it isn’t clear how this figure was arrived at). The report has emboldened not only Farage, but also the Conservatives, who finished 500 or so votes above the Monster Raving Loony Party, to cry foul. Both parties have referred the matter to the police. Manchester city council said no issues had been reported. They called it “extremely disappointing” that Democracy Volunteer made their claims after polls closed.
British Iranians flood the city centre following US-Israeli strikes on Iran
It was another weekend of rallies in Manchester city centre. This time, over 1,000 people — many British-Iranians — gathered to show their support for US and Israeli strikes on Iran. Since January, there have been weekly protests in St Peter’s Square against the Islamic Republic of Iran, following its deadly crackdown on a citizen uprising. While exact figures are hard to verify due to a ban on independent media reporting freely in the country, the BBC estimates that between 6,000 and 30,000 protestors have been killed since December. After weeks of unrest, the US and Israel’s attack swelled the number of people rallying in Manchester in a “solidarity” demonstration. One protestor, who wished to remain anonymous, told the BBC that “In an ideal world, no citizen would like their country to be bombed”. However, she feels that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is a military branch of the Iranian Armed Forces, has driven compatriots to such desperation for change that they’re in favour of US action. In response, Iran has launched retaliatory attacks on the Gulf states, and all flights from Manchester Airport to parts of the Middle East and India have been cancelled.
Open newsroom
Over the last few months we’ve been getting quite a lot of emails about taxi drivers — specifically, taxi drivers at Manchester airport. Got any big thoughts about black cabs? Send them to Ophira.
Home of the week
This property in Bury has a back-terrace bar with extraordinary charm. It’s on the market for £210,000.
What our writers are up to this week
❔Ophira is never actually clear on what’s going on at Impiety Hour – Ancoats’ Catholicism-themed cocktail bar – but she has reason to believe that whatever is happening there on Thursday is meant to be good. See if you can make any sense of it here.
🍜 Continuing a previous newsletter’s theme of the ideal kind of places to take a family member for a one-on-one lunch in the city centre — with all the usual pettiness and gripes about upcoming weddings and distant cousins — we recommend Doux Chaton on Deansgate. A Vietnamese cafe with an outpost in Liverpool too, Jack’s Gran said the spring rolls are “to die for” and that he should also grow his curls out again. Menu here.
🌐 Perhaps not quite as relaxing as the above suggestions, but if you’re in the mood to wrestle with some of life’s big questions on a Tuesday evening, this might be the talk for you. Lucy will be at Waterstones on Deansgate tomorrow to hear Sarah Wynn-Williams, former global policy director at Facebook, discuss whether we’ve lost control of the internet — and if so, whether it’s possible to win it back.
In the past few weeks The Mill has brought you what we believe has been the best coverage of any publication of the Gorton and Denton by-election: Breaking two major stories and producing the most in-depth profiles of the three major candidates.
Normal service will now resume, and perhaps many of you will be thankful for some respite from the non-stop politics. We would like to remind you though, that all of that coverage was put out totally free of charge. Our business model relies on paid subscriptions, so forgoing that for three weeks isn’t exactly very shrewd from a money-making perspective, but we did so because we think it’s vital for our democracy that people have as much information as they can about local political races like this one. It’s something that has been sorely missing with the degradation of local news in the past few decades.
Though it may have been free to read, it wasn’t free to produce. It remains true that all of the Mill’s non-paying subscribers are essentially paid for by our paying members. If you’d like to join their ranks, here’s the link
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