So Elias, could you give us a bit about your background?

I’m from East Manchester and am now a student at one of the universities. I’ve grown up under austerity and seen the effects of it on myself and my family. Cuts, particularly around health and social care have had a massive personal impact on me.

I spend a lot of my time being angry, but I also try and do community work on different projects. It keeps me mostly sane. I still feel powerless to address much of the poverty you see just walking around the city centre though.

Did that inform what you wrote then?

Definitely. This isn’t just about Covid-19. This is about decades of social experimentation by a remote government on some of the poorest areas of the country, that have been actively held down to see what would happen. “The north” was a very important thing. There’s at least a thousand years of history on this going back to the Harrowing of the North [by William the Conqueror] through to Thatcherism and de-industrialisation.

It’s not just a Manchester or Greater Manchester issue, though Andy Burnham seems to have become a figurehead for a set of reasons, in part his own skill set and in part the cultural strength of Manchester as a city. This is about to be Sheffield’s problem, Bradford’s problem, Doncaster’s problem. Places that are going to be even less able to deal with this than us, the “London of the north”.

So this wasn’t entirely spontaneous, was there a specific catalyst for doing it now?

I was watching Newsnight and there was a pub that a friend of mine actually worked in and it really took me aback like, “Shit, they’re going to close”. And I looked to my flatmate and said “they’re literally treating us like a petri dish”. I’m a performer myself so when places you’ve done gigs start closing and making staff redundant it really hits home.

I’ve mates who work in bars who have lost their job and don’t know when they’re getting another. Once again my generation gets shafted.

This is neoliberalism at its most sadistic. We’re having minimum wage workers on two thirds of their salary for months and months, it feels like some experiment to see how much you can grind people down.

You combine that with what we’ve gone through in the last few elections with Cambridge Analytica and the targeting of democratic institutions and minority groups to see how they can be manipulated, it’s horrendous.

With the slogan, I wanted something that everyone could agree with to battle that fragmentation. As I say we need a broader base of support than just “Labour”, even in Manchester. I decided we needed something unifying, though obviously I think the way to do that is rooted in a Left tradition.

Was that why you did it in red paint?

Yeah. That and I broke the black paint can. I also considered painting “Scargill was right”. Seriously though, I knew what I was going to write before I left the house.

I chose Piccadilly Gardens because I wanted it to be seen by commuters. By doing direct action in somewhere as stark as Piccadilly Gardens it reached ordinary people. So much of the messaging we do on the left is internal, it’s speaking to ourselves. It can be an echo chamber. We need to cut through that. I wanted it to be visible to people going about their lives and to give them a sense that the anger they’re feeling is shared.

There’s also the point that it’s a publicly owned wall in a ward where the local councillors are better than most, so I thought it probably had a better chance of staying up for a bit.

There is a history of using the city centre as a canvass and there’s been some institutional support for that recently. It’s really important when so many avenues of political and artistic expression have been trashed by the Tories to have some spaces for people to get the anger out.

Did you expect the reaction this got?

No. I did it early in the morning, as I say to catch commuters. I thought it might well disappear in a hour. I took a couple of pictures, sent them off and then went to bed because I’d been up all night. Woke up to it being in the Manchester Evening News.

It’s quite nice to see people taking photos with it. I saw someone busking in front of it which was beautiful. The freaky thing was if you typed “The north is” into Google it popped up in the suggestions.

Do you have any other bits of direct action planned?

That would be telling. The best way I think I can act right now is by being in alliance with people I trust to best sort out the crisis. I think the point is though, as I said at the beginning, you have a whole generation of people in Britain for who the current economic situation isn’t a break from normal, it’s just an intensification of all the problems in our society that had already been heaped upon them. We’re seeing a massive polarisation. I think whoever does it we’re going to see more direct opposition because people have run out of options and increasingly feel they have little left to lose.