‘I’m going insane’: My afternoon at Manchester’s anti-woke meetup

Dear readers — where would you go in town if you wanted to spend your Saturday afternoon listening to a “mini-lesson” about the breakdown of the traditional family, the “decolonisation” of the school curriculum and the general decay of Western values?

The answer, it turns out, is the Briton’s Protection, one of Manchester’s most historic pubs, where a large group of people get together on a monthly basis to talk about ideas that they fear will get them cast out of polite society. The Cancelling Cancel Culture get-togethers are supposed to be a safe space for people with heterodox views to gather and speak openly. So who goes? And what do they believe in? We sent Jack along to find out.

I walk into the Briton’s Protection one cold Saturday afternoon and head upstairs to the function room for a meet-up called Cancelling Cancel Culture. The room has stale carpets and red felt seats, and the walls are lined with old photos of Manchester. 

It’s already full when I arrive, attendees chat and drink and rearrange to accommodate newcomers. Today’s topic is the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes introduced in workplaces and schools in recent years. Do they represent “education or indoctrination”? I suspect the consensus in this particular room might be indoctrination, but I’ve got an open mind. 

The meeting is packed, perhaps 50 of us in total. Most of my fellow attendees are white men, but there are around a dozen women, one of whom is South Asian. It’s not exactly a diverse group, but somehow it is more diverse than I was expecting from a Cancel Culture get together: there are more women than I had imagined, and ages range from 30s upwards. 

The speaker today is Barry Wall, a consultant and educator who says he worked in workplace DEI training for decades, before realising that much of it is based on an “identitarian-based, murderous ideology”. He has a tic when he speaks that you will immediately notice if you spend a bit of time on his YouTube channel: a gleeful cackle that breaks out every few sentences, even if he’s talking about something quite serious. 

Wall says he lost freelance work with the University of Manchester teaching PhD students critical thinking and leadership skills because of comments he made about people on Canal Street having sex in toilets. Wall is gay, and since 2018 has been a strident member of the so-called “gender critical” movement. He has a YouTube channel called Court of the EDI Jester (EDI is a rearrangement of DEI) where he posts videos critiquing queer theory and “gender ideology”. It has more than 5,000 subscribers. 

In one video from last year, Wall breaks down an interview between the Guardian columnist Owen Jones and feminist writer Judith Butler. He says Butler supports “the insertion of queering into the lives of all and particularly into the lives of children”. Wall then says "they've got to get them young. That's why these fuckers are in libraries, with their trans and nonbinary fucking creatures." Last week, Wall gleefully celebrated a Telegraph story about the government supposedly “cracking down” on civil servants who waste public money on diversity activism.

After housekeeping has been completed and upcoming free speech events signposted, Wall is introduced and gives an expansive lecture covering schools, gender identity, trans children and “activist teachers”. He tells us the education system has abandoned critical thinking as a concept, and instead dedicates itself to turning children into activists that parrot woke ideology. 

The people around me seem to broadly agree. One woman tells the room “we should teach our children to be proud of being British”. Wall, and many attendees, agree that the decolonisation of curriculums is making white British children less patriotic. 

Who are these people? Are they bigots who resent that racism and sexism have become increasingly taboo in modern Britain and need somewhere to come and vent? Or do many of them just hold fairly mainstream socially conservative positions, amped up by a bit of internet-induced paranoia about how everyone is trying to shut them down? 

Sitting next to me is Paul, a man in his 50s who is wearing a yellow pullover and raincoat. Before the meeting begins, I ask him what has brought him here. He turns to me.

“I’m going insane.”