Manchester Pride on the Brink of financial collapse

[defrazzled]

Article from the Manchester Mill on line newspaper. This is a huge event in the city every year. I used to run a Charity and find the lack of financial acumen and responsibility bizarre for an organisation of this size.

Exclusive: Manchester Pride is on the brink of collapse

The Mill understands that the organisation is about to go into administration
By The Mill • 16 Oct 2025
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Photo: Manchester Pride website.

Manchester Pride is preparing to enter administration, The Mill has learned. Two people with direct knowledge of the situation have told us that Manchester Pride Ltd, the organisation that runs the event, has run out of money and can no longer pay its bills.
We have not heard back from Manchester Pride or their PR firm, despite two attempts to get their response. Manchester City Council did not confirm or deny our story, and referred us to Pride.
Yesterday morning, a number of artists and performers wrote a letter complaining about not being paid for their performances in this year’s Pride, which took place in August. They said they had received “automated replies, contradictions, and shifting expectations” and that Manchester Pride had missed its 30-day payment terms.
The letter, which has been shared with The Mill, went on: “This isn’t just an administrative failure – it’s a breach of trust and legality.” Artists are said to have been left struggling to pay their rent and bills.
The Mill understands that Manchester Pride has been seeking other sources of funding in recent months but has been unable to find enough capital to carry on. It is expected to enter administration – the official process for an insolvent company – in the coming days.
The last published accounts for Manchester Pride Ltd only go up to the end of 2023, but they show that it was already in trouble. Despite generating £2.7m in revenue, it lost £467,000 that year, almost as much as it lost in 2020, the worst year of the pandemic. That left the organisation with a negative cashflow of £356,000, the worst cash position its had in the past decade.
It’s unclear how Pride has performed financially since then, because the accounts covering 2024 won’t be due until December, but a note in the 2023 accounts suggests that the board were worried about the financial health of the organisation, and that they made “appropriate enquiries” about whether Manchester Pride Ltd was still a going concern.

Manchester Pride Ltd is, like most significant charities, both a registered company and a registered charity, and it has been criticised in the past for veering away from its campaigning mission and becoming overly commercial. It also operates a non-profit events company called Manchester Pride Events, which is a subsidiary of the main entity.
Pride is one of the largest events in the city – regularly attracting more than 100,000 visitors – and its collapse is likely to have major implications, including questions about how Manchester will put on a Pride event next year.

Schools are stuffed full of homophobia, which I assume is due to people’s private home lives being full of homophobia too. You can button your lip at work, but behind closed doors people say what they really think.
I think pride as was still has a place. It’s a shame the gender wars and a load of weird fetish behaviour have turned sponsors off pride. Homophobia is still an issue.

So let me get my head around this, a man pretending to be a woman, is in a relationship with a woman pretending to be a man…….

Monty Python comes to mind.

totally ignoring all the major social controversies and such, I think there is a really basic underlying issue these groups are facing.

These events are far too large and expensive for what they are, which should be a somewhat minor summer event that lasts a weekend. That's what's appropriate and congruent with other kinds of events about similar sized groups of people. Instead the time, resources, and money being spent has approached or even surpassed the major celebrations of the cities they are in.

It's a kind of fad created by injections of corporate money, which is really just given to make the companies look cool and with it. Had those funds never existed, it would have stayed a smaller, more manageable, and more sustainable event.

And given those funds are leaving now…

Agreed.

Its possible to run these events and turn a profit. The demand is there.

However they've simply become too OTT and not grassroots enough.

The result is performers get left out of pocket.

Its not cool.

Well they FAFO'ed. This is what happens when they betray the gay rights movement and focus almost 100% solely on womanface and males in dresses who say lesbians should suck their cocks.

I read a newspaper article online several months back, I believe it was during pride month. The young male author was talking about 'queer' this, 'queer' that. I started reading it and had a hunch. I started doing Ctrl F through the article for words like gay, queer, drag, trans. Do you know that the word gay did not appear once in that article? NOT....ONCE. An article about pride, which was founded by and for gay rights. Yet gay was not mentioned even once. Queer about 17 times, trans around 11, drag I think was 5. NOT...ONE mention of gay. At all. Not one.

And they wonder why gay and lesbian people are not going to pride anymore and they are going broke.

Sadly I believe these pride groups are so deeply and utterly captured, brainwashed and entrenched that they will never, ever, ever, ever get it. If they do, they will simply blame gays and lesbians for being 'transphobic' and wrongthink. They will never ever admit they have got it so very wrong and dragged (pardon the pun) gay rights back 50 years.

No bad thing to see the back of it, in its current form at least.

Even if this person is an adult, having life altering surgery is a tragedy and doing so for commercial reasons is even more tragic. The surgeons doing such operations are bloody vultures feasting off vulnerable and horribly misinformed people.

Rainbow stuff has long struck me as fundamentally performative, focused on outward displays of support in ways other rights movements aren't. (Very few people are flying flags in support of women, ethnic minorities or the disabled.) It's easy to suspect that people who are so keen to be seen to be supporting the right side might be less keen to actually donate money and other helpful things like that. The performances get flashier and flashier, but the donations don't increase to match - may even be decreasing, as big corporate donors get bored of the bandwagon.

Yours sincerely

Outraged of Tunbridge Wells

I wish they'd go back to Gay Pride

2024/2025 were the years when the bottom really started to fall out of the Pride grift (pun intended), so it will be interesting to see their next accounts. Which are probaby why they're going bust now, because a lot of the corporate sponsorship has gone away.

Although not paying the artists who performed is really shitty. I bet all the people running the Manchester Pride grift have been paying their own salaries!

I imagine there is a push for making things bigger and better each year. Add to that the many letters added to the rainbow (in 2023 they were raising money for queer, trans and intersex people of colour) it dilutes what their actual aim is.

I think Manchester Pride hit peak bullshit - when a straight woman (labelling herself queer) got a gay man kicked out for wearing an LGB Alliance cap.

😭😭

“Katie” Neeves was concurring.

Oh, no 😭 The market for being regaled about one's first dirty crossdressing experience 😳 has collapsed. 📉

Won't someone think of the children. 🥺

I agree. Pride used to serve a purpose to do with acceptance and understanding.
In my opinion it now serves a totally different purpose of virtue signalling and rubbing other people's noses in fetishes knowing full well it makes people uncomfortable, but smug in the knowledge that if anyone even murmurs the slightest doubt they will be villified with the full considerable weight of the neon haired thought police.
It's not about breaking down barriers anymore, it's about erecting new social barriers to build a prison for the unvirtuous. Witch hunters sniffing out and hunting down heretics and unbelievers. An Intersectional Inquisition that would make The Spanish blush at the savagery. Culminating in the euphoric enjoyment of punishing others. You get to relentlessly batter untermensch and feel good about yourself in the process. What more ecstatic hedonism could a meritless drab grey personless person ask for? All the gawdy colours they wear on their outsides compensation for the dark void of colour in their soul.

I owe a huge debt, by far to a group of people who are in the largest majority gay, for standing up for my rights in the last few years. In standing up for their own rights, they also stood up for mine. A debt I won't ever forget. For that community I will always have high regard, respect, and they will have my support. But for the narcissistic aposematic cultists of gender ideology I do, and will always, celebrate every defeat and downfall they suffer with glee, delight, and long savour the lasting taste of their visible wretchedness.

Looking at the pictures of the Graf's, the first thing I see is how much bigger a male head is than a female head.
We don't notice it most of the time, but when you see a transman and a transwoman together it highlights it.

It is another sad time in the litany of sad times that the special rainbow people are facing. My heart is literally breaking.

There was basically a coup a few years ago with Pride in Boston, Massachusetts. The people who knew how to run things were forced out. There were conflicts over general ideology and fiscal ethics. The elder experts finally had enough and just quit.

I wonder if something similar is happening in other cities. Are the people who know how to stick to practicality and worked so hard to build up these events now being drowned out in favor of the newer generation that doesn’t yet understand how to actually run things?

We don’t really need it now anyway. There’s single sex marriage and everything
don’t know why we can’t just March anyway, why need a grant?

It's literal menocide

Liverpool was different for a couple of reasons. It has always been free, Manchester has always been a ticketed, paid for event I think.

Liverpool listened to ‘the community’ and turned down a major sponsor (Barclays iirc?) over Palestine.

I can literally smell the testosterone dying.

🤣🤣🤣

I seem to remember reading something earlier this year, regarding highly inflated salaries. Could that be a reason, alongside corporate sponsors pulling out?