We made six pledges to Manchester. Now we're making good on them

Dear readers — a quiet week so far from us, giving your inboxes a wide berth on Tuesday and Wednesday, but now prepare for a four-day blitz. We’ve got more top-of-the-range election coverage inbound, as well as a piece by Lucy about the big chains buying up all the nurseries in south Manchester, then finally an Ophira investigation into the massacre of pigeons at Manchester Victoria station. 

Today, though, we wanted to update you on our six campaign pledges from last year’s 1000-member push, which we’ve been busying ourselves with quietly in the background. And before even that, Jack Dulhanty brings you the latest from Gorton and Denton, where we attended the first hustings of the campaign on Wednesday evenings (after which we went to watch the football in The Plough, and made friends with Mike, pictured below, who won’t be voting because he says all politicians do is “shaft us”).

Your Mill briefing

The by-election in Gorton and Denton is in full swing, with the streets of the constituency crawling with campaigners — mostly spreading the word for the three top contenders: Labour, the Greens and Reform UK. The Mill was at a local hustings at Gorton Methodist Church on Tuesday night, where Labour’s Angeliki Stogia and the Greens’ Hannah Spencer (along with candidates from the Lib Dems, Communist League, Social Democrats and Advance UK) made their case to voters. Stogia opened with a poem about Manchester; Spencer railed against “bland Labour politicians”. Stogia pointed to the breakfast clubs the local Labour party is opening in the area, Spencer said the Greens would tax Manchester’s wealthy developers. Neither candidate seemed to galvanise voters. As one Labour member, in a not so ringing endorsement, put it: “They were alright.”

One candidate who wasn’t present was Reform’s Matt Goodwin. The organisers of the event, a community group called Local Voices, said they had been inundated with emails from Reform supporters across Greater Manchester who wanted to support Goodwin, but they had to close it off to locals only. In a statement, Goodwin said his absence was because he had “serious concerns about the impartiality” of the hustings. He said Local Voice’s previous statements “give the clear impression that a fair and level platform will not be provided for all candidates”. He didn’t specify which statements he was referring to, but organisers said he pulled out of the hustings with about 30 minutes to spare. He said he will be present at tonight's hustings, hosted by Levenshulme community association.

There is still a lot of back on forth on who the frontrunner really is. While the Greens lead the polls and Reform disregard Labour’s chances, many Labour figures still say they’re confident the party can retain a seat it has held for a century. The area’s Muslim vote — making up 30% of the constituency — will be decisive. Last month, pressure group the Muslim Vote endorsed the Greens, but campaigners on the ground told The Mill that Labour is campaigning hard in the constituency’s mosques, with PoliticsHome reporting that Labour is confident that older Muslim voters will remain loyal. Though some local members have told The Mill they think the strategy is a “regressive mindset…With second, third generation kids, it doesn’t work.” 

Meanwhile, rumours have surrounded Spencer, the Green candidate – mostly online, where much of these campaigns are being waged: in local Facebook groups and on X. Multiple voters, even local councillors, have come to The Mill asking us to investigate the mansion Spencer has been rumoured to live in. She has denied this, and MEN published a story debunking it. Elsewhere, the Telegraph has reported how Spencer once criticised Levenshulme high street in a 2021 Mumsnet post, saying it was a “long row of (supposedly) money laundering takeaways,” and that she was glad to have moved. Asked about the coverage, a member of Spencer’s campaign told The Mill: “There are people out there with huge amounts of money and staff teams who have dedicated that research to digging up whatever they can on Hannah because they’re threatened by her.”

We made six pledges to Manchester. Now we're making good on them

At precisely this time two months ago we were just about to finish our 1,000 member campaign, the product of several months of work and planning. We had about 900 members on the board and two days left to go. The atmosphere in the Mill office was pregnant with excitement. 

As you’ll know, we made it over the line and then some, with a final tally on the board of 1,224. Not only was doing the campaign enormous fun, spending the period out and about around Manchester handing out copies of our print edition, or meeting the many Millers who visited us on St Ann’s Square to pitch in, it was also transformative to what we can achieve as the Mill. We went from 3,400 paying members to 4,400 in less than a month, which would normally represent a solid year. On the little graph we use where our ‘worm’ tracks our growth (see below) you’ll notice how the worm appears to have developed ideas above its station and has gone soaring off like a bald eagle. That’s thanks to you.

Since the campaign closed I hope we’ve spent our loot wisely: we’ve had Lucy join the team and we’ve started the new year as strongly as any year previously, with our by-election scoop about Reform UK breaking the law in Gorton and Denton, the resignation of James Binks as CEO of Rochdale and, of course, our very petty MEN protest. 

But we’d also made a promise, and, lest you’d begun to think we pocketed a quick ton and swiftly forgot all about our six pledges to the people of Manchester, let us disabuse you of that notion. Despite the frenzy of by-election coverage and the fights we’ve been picking with rival publishers, we have also been quietly putting the pieces in place to make good on that promise. 

First things first, pledge one: to teach fact-checking in schools to counter online misinformation. In the past few weeks we’ve been making contact with schools around Manchester and arranging times to do this. This was the most popular of all of the pledges, and represented what appeared to be a real theme of the ones our readers voted for when we gave them a list of 40: a fear about the world younger people are growing up in where so much of their lives are online, and thus controlled by social media platforms run by billionaires where there is a huge profit motive in spreading complete nonsense. We already have three schools who we’ve agreed to visit and if you work in education and want to join the list, get in touch with us here.

Next, our Good News edition is up and running. Lucy put the first one together last month, including the Wigan estate which has been turned around by the hard work of its residents, our inaugural Miller of the month (Alex Timperley, who set up the Manchester City fans foodbank) and the very welcome news that the north Atlantic salmon has made its long-overdue, and frankly quite emotional, return to the rivers of the north-west. Edition two on its way later this month.

We’re also the pieces in place to make good on our pledge to widen access to quality journalism. A huge bonus of Lucy’s arrival has been our increased capacity to produce great videos promoting our pieces; we were all extremely thrilled to see a recent Instagram post of ours hit 20,000 likes (we’re used to languishing in the doldrums of the low-hundreds). We’re also planning to get together another Mill print edition later in the year.

The only pledge we haven’t made much progress on, yet, is our mentorship programme for young Mancunians. But we’re going to be setting this up in the next two months so if you have any budding young journalists in your families (in their late teens and keen to get a jump in their careers) then, again, get in touch and send them our way.

Then finally we have our two political coverage pledges; to give free Mill subscriptions to teenage first-time voters and to deploy a dedicated elections reporter to cover the May elections in depth. Those two pledges will come into play soon, just ahead of the elections, but I’d like to think our coverage from Gorton and Denton already shows how important this will be.

So far in this by-election we’ve broken the biggest story of any outlet, we have another big scoop in the works for Saturday and we’re publishing in-depth profiles of all of the main candidates next week. All of this will be sent out for free; a decision we’ve taken because we want as many of you who are registered to vote in the constituency to have as much information as possible. It’s no exaggeration to say this by-election is one of the most significant the country has seen in years. Its outcome could well have a huge impact on the fate of the Prime Minister, the ascendant Reform and Green parties and the fate of the country. 

All we would say, if you aren’t currently a subscriber, is that just because we’re putting all of our politics coverage out for free at the moment, that sadly doesn’t make it free to produce. We’re in a really strong position subscribers-wise thanks to our campaign and reckon we could hit 5,000 later in the year, but it remains the case that without those paying subs we wouldn’t have a publication at all. If you want to see us keep growing and getting stronger, join the gang.