A brief history | Factsheet | Articles | Live blogs | Videos | Contact
Introduction
A brief history — what happened?
Quotes about access during Manchester Pride's Big Weekend.
Factsheets
Factsheets from earlier years.
Live blog (during the weekend)
Live blogs from earlier years.
Articles
The 30th anniversary of the 1991 Christmas Costume Ball.
A 2002 pride planning meeting was told that charging to enter public streets was unlawful.
Naked streak: how FactsMCR exposed poor standards at the Manchester Evening News.
The mystery of the "missing" traffic order for Pride 2018.
Manchester Metrolink: what is the procedure for suspicious packages on Manchester's trams?
Archives reveal "regular, ranting bigotry about gays" in the pages of the Manchester Evening News.
Videos
A touching speech by Paul Orton of Clone Zone on the Monday night in 1991.
The Pride poster — erasing us since at least 2007.
Falsely told to buy a wristband for the HIV/AIDS Vigil in 2007 & 2008.
Manchester Pride staff caught on live video misleading the public in 2017.
Julia Grant on bullying & intimidation in Manchester.
Other
Our 2022 Factsheet (PDF) about Manchester Pride is available (there won't be a new factsheet for 2023). Read about your right to access the Gay Village without buying a wristband, history & opinion .
Download the PDF version.
And here it is as two images (handy for sharing on social media): page 1 | page 2
Our factsheet from 2021 is still well-worth a look. It has four pages of facts, gossip and fun. Download it as a PDF here. See our factsheets page for other years.
The ruling by the Local Government Ombudsman in April 2015 (PDF). The Ombudsman decided that Manchester City Council had exceeded its powers by mentioning wristbands in a traffic order and that it was unlawful to restrict access to premises (businesses and homes).
Minutes of a meeting at Marketing Manchester in November 2002. These show that those present were told they couldn't charge people to enter public streets. However some of them went ahead and did so from 2003 onwards for a decade.
At the meeting were: Manchester City Council, GHT, the LGF (now known as the LGBT Foundation), Marketing Manchester, the organisers of Europride 2003. The advice seems to have come from the police. Yet the police apparently then turned a blind eye...
This document was unearthed at the Library Archives quite recently by a FactsMCR campaigner.
Since the ruling by the Local Government Ombudsman in 2015 the media — both LGBT and mainstream — have stayed silent about the decade-long wristband fiddle and your rights. So some people continue to pay unnecessarily.
All your favourites know: GayStarNews, Pink News, Manchester Evening News, The Guardian, BBC and many more. In a letter to us, the BBC defended its journalist right not to report this. The same BBC that championed consumer rights at one time now prefers to cosy up to the civil-rights-infringing Manchester Pride, as a "sponsor" (the BBC says it doesn't give money).
These organisations don't need to lie. They simply ignore an issue completely. Or, they report some of the facts; perhaps popping in just one or two bits they don't like, to add a fake impression of balance. That's how they manipulate opinion in the direction they think it should go.
The veteran ITV reporter John Pilger says that "not reporting" is the most powerful form of censorship.
What else aren't they telling us?
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