Inside Manchester’s Covid anti-vaxx protests

The story of an ex-military officer, an Instagram army, and an illegal march through the city.

A December morning in Manchester. It’s crisp outside, wet underfoot. The nail salon shutters grind open after a frosty night. Restaurants are all closed, the pubs boarded up and spray-painted with graffiti messages for a government 200 miles away.

In Piccadilly Gardens, there’s a man sat on a stone step burning paper and plastic to warm his hands, while a statue of a monarch arches over him, looking down glumly.

A group of entranced devotees play hand drums and chant the name of a mystical character from an ancient Eastern religion, praying, as if for salvation, as if they know something we don’t.

Then a crowd begins to gather.

And it’s a carnival. There are air horns going off, and whistles. Chants of “Stand up for freedom!” against a rhythm banged out on the bass drum from a marching band. Piers Corbyn, climate change denier and brother of former Labour leader Jeremy, shouts through a megaphone, “we are at war with vaccinations”.

About 500 people turn out. And police too, some on horses, some carrying guns. Government rules mean you’re not meant to gather in groups. But thanks to a loophole in the law, protests are allowed. Marches are not. The police are here to keep people safe, and to keep them where they are.

People are protesting because they don’t want to wear masks. Or they don’t want to take a vaccine, and don’t want more lockdowns. Or maybe people are here because they’re confused and scared. And they want to see their families at Christmas.

As the Covid-19 virus has spread and deaths increased, people have looked online for answers, and the stories that spread fastest are often the wildest and most dystopic.

Like the ‘Great Reset’, which goes something like this: the virus is a hoax planned by an anonymous corporate elite in order to make the rich richer, crash the economy, control us using forced vaccinations, and usher in a new era of wholesale communism via a single overarching global government.

Wow.

“It gives a narrative that makes sense of what is a complex situation,” said Dr Jovan Byford, author of Conspiracy Theories, A Critical Introduction, speaking to Colin Drury at the Independent. “By creating scapegoats, it gives an object for those feelings of anger or rage which, otherwise, we do not know where to direct.”

Someone holds a canvas sign above their head: ‘RESIST THE RESET SLAVE AGENDA’.

There’s a guy dressed a bit like a Christmas elf banging on a tambourine.

Gloria Gaynor’s 1978 disco hit is blaring out of a boombox: “I will survive!”

Welcome to ‘the North Unites, Freedom Rally’.

— —

The word ‘march’ comes from the 13th century Middle English ‘marchen’ meaning “to have a common boundary”. And maybe Covid-19 could’ve been the ultimate common boundary, our species finally bound together in a common fight. A magic event that breaks the spell and wakes us up to our shared vulnerability. Waking us up to the boundary that is most common to us all, that liminal line between living and not.

But the crowds in Manchester show we didn’t all wake up the same way. We look to our online echo chambers for information, enchanted by our screens, entranced within our own versions of reality.

The protesters in Manchester are in a minority but their message is catching on. An Ipsos-Mori poll from August showed 85% of Brits agreed or strongly agreed that they would take a vaccine — by October that number was down to 79%.

Mis-information is spreading fast. 1 in 3 of us have seen messaging telling us not to take the vaccine, and 58% of that was on Facebook.

In a post for King’s College London, clinical neuroscientist Anna McLaughlin said, “the issue is that when people are under heightened stress and they want to resolve uncertainty, they can lose their ability to weigh and judge information effectively.”

“This means we may not be able to discern reliable information from inaccurate or biased information,” she added. “Especially when search engines and social media algorithms are optimised to prioritise content that aligns with our existing values and beliefs.”

We’ve been cooped up in our homes for nine months, alone with our computers, looking to them as oracles, searching for answers, gradually working ourselves into a paranoid psychogenic fever dream.

— —

Then a few months ago, one of these seekers rose up.

The reiki master, hypnotherapist and self-proclaimed “future leader of the free world”, Paul Boys.

A 40-year-old army veteran who’s now a personal trainer for some British TV actors, Boys started sharing Covid-19 conspiracy theory memes via his personal Instagram account. Then in October, he created the Twitter profile ‘Rise Up Manchester’ and started planning mass protests in the city.

He used Remembrance Sunday, November 8th, for a mass gathering, telling police the event was to commemorate British military who lost their lives. Instead, 600 people turned up for his anti-vaxx, anti-lockdown protest. He was fined £10,000.

In December, Boys sent another clarion call to his 19,000 Instagram followers: “Several thousand of us. United, as one. For one common goal, freedom. See you there. December 6th.”

He again drew hundreds of people to Manchester — coming from Leeds, Liverpool, Norwich, Cumbria, London. Speaking to them through a makeshift PA system. Explaining how the Government is “stripping people of their freedoms”. He said: “We will not accept any mandate vaccination”. He was again fined £10,000.

Then, two days before today’s march, he simply posted:

“North Unites”

“Saturday, 1pm, Piccadilly Gardens”

“#Manchester”

— —

The Rise Up Manchester campaign was inspired in part by conservative libertarian MPs like Graham Brady, a hero of the tabloid Daily Mail, who said there was not enough evidence to justify putting the country into lockdown. Despite the number of UK deaths approaching 70,000 at the time.

Speaking in the House of Commons on December 1st Brady said, “if Government is to take away the fundamental liberties of the people whom we represent, they must show they are acting in a way that is absolutely necessary. Today, I believe the government has failed to make that compelling case.”

The British Medical Journal, in an article published on November 13th, added more fuel to the fire.

“Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain,” wrote executive editor Kamran Abbasi. “Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health.”

Abbasi questions the logic of mass screening, and what he sees as “inappropriate government involvement” in its scientific advisory group. He also calls out a lack of transparency and due diligence around inaccurate testing equipment.

And it’s a message that landed well with some people in Manchester. A city with a deep suspicion of London-centrist politics. With a spirit born in the events of a summer’s day 200 years ago on what’s now Peter Street, where 60,000 people protested peacefully to demand voting rights, and 15 people lost their lives to the police.

But today’s protest is not a mass movement. It’s a minority clutching onto some unlikely stories that they found online. It’s not about political representation, it’s a reaction born of panic.

“Covid itself affects the population unequally,” said Clifford Stott, professor of social psychology at Keele University, speaking to Nicola Davis at the Guardian. “You’re more likely to die if you’re from a poor background.”

Stott advises the government on how to police ‘collective disorder’ related to the pandemic. And he said it’s the working classes that are likely to be harder hit by the pandemic and its lockdowns.

“The widespread unemployment that’s going to flow from the economic dip is going to be another factor that amplifies the discontent in society,” he said. “That can flow into the emergence of confrontation and rioting.”

— —

It’s about 2pm. Sunlight starts to break through greyish clouds. The afternoon is warming up and the crowd is on the move. The protest has become a march.

At a march in November, police issued a dispersal order, arrested four people and gave out twenty four £200 fines. A number of police officers were injured. Today, they just seem to be watching it unfold.

I follow the group down Market Street, the city’s main shopping district. There’s chanting, drumming, airhorns, whistles. Someone hands me a flyer telling the government to end lockdowns, business closures, and police brutality. A long-haired guy carrying an acoustic guitar over his shoulder looks across at me and says, “take off your mask, don’t be a slave.”

People are watching the parade from their apartment windows as it clashes with crowds of Christmas shoppers. A bald middle-aged man is leaning out of his window with his top off, his middle finger pointed squarely at the protest. Someone runs past me shouting “freedom” through a megaphone. An angry bystander holding her Christmas shopping in Primark bags shouts something about “killing people” but I can’t make it out over the noise.

It’s a clash of those wanting a Christmas without lockdown, and those trying to make Christmas as normal as it can be. The march moves down through the main shopping district, two worlds coming face-to-face. Those with masks, and those without.

There are no police statements about injuries, arrests, warrants, or fines. It wasn’t a riot. It seems no one got hurt.

— —

That evening back on Market Street, there are protest flyers scattered across the ground, and a stillness.

I see a tall bearded wizard-like man holding a long wooden recorder to his mouth, playing lonely melodies to the empty street. He looks like he’s survived something epic and has come back to tell the tale through his songs.

He’s playing Auld Lang Syne. An old Scottish song, sang on the last day of December to say farewell to the previous year. It reminds us, the “seas between us” have been “stormy”.

He finishes, slips the recorder inside his long jacket, and makes his way back up Market Street towards Piccadilly Gardens.

And then, the street is silent.