Originally written in 2024 in response to the Farage Riots, it contains perennial truths.
Did we grow right here? Did we sprout out of the very ground we inhabit? Are we vegetables? Or, did we arrive here by an historic process?
My Dad once said that:
‘Manchester is a city of fleeing immigrants.’ Joe Moss.
My family flowed into the region from different places and coagulated in Manchester. My ancestors are immigrants. I am an immigrant. I fled Stockport, then fled Manchester, then fled the North West, then fled London, to Scotland, to the far north, then I was forced by economic circumstance to flee again, to Elsewhereshire, and I’m hoping to flee again one day, to somewhere that feels like home.
The components of my family, the ancestors, mostly came from Ireland and Scotland. They fled to Manchester for a variety of reasons. My maternal Grandmother came from Selkirk, Scotland. The map of the life that was plotted for her, a mill worker or in service of the landed aristocracy, was torn to pieces by the upheaval of World War Two. She married my Granddad who was from Stockport, of Irish immigrant heritage. She moved to Manchester to raise a family and to work in the nascent post- war social democracy.
My paternal grandmother was born in Salford, her parents were of immigrant ancestry, from Ireland on her father’s side and her mother was born in Texas. Their family had emigrated to the United States from Lancashire, returning to Salford in the late 19th century, fleeing from Texas.
As far as I can tell, nobody in my family grew out of the soil, they were all uprooted, forced to move in the swells and surges of economic tides that washed so many people up on different and sometimes distant shores.
There was a time when more people lived on the land but the land was cleared, sheep took over the fields, bloody immigrant sheep coming over here to eat our shrubs and shoots! The people were cleared off the lands and forced to move to towns and cities, forced by necessity, by the need to survive.
Brexit legend Wayne Morgan, with the look of a haunted Ron Moody, glad to get his country back, while the ghost of touchline Graham Taylor haunts British politics.
The point here is that necessity is the motive for most migration, history tells us this. History can seem like a mass of conflicting opinions, but the history of data is reliable. We have bureaucratic evidence of the effects of historic migrations in censuses and polls, in tax ledgers and tolls. We can see how our towns and cities grew, swelling in the Nineteenth century, the data shows the waves of immigration. We’ve not been here that long and our cities have already exhausted their purpose as the locations of industrial societies and now either thrive or decline, we exist in habitus fluxus, always on unsteady ground.
Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority. Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism.
Immigration is a capitalist process, we move for work. That necessary migration creates wage competition which creates job insecurity and poverty. This process is consistent throughout history, and when people get pissed off by their lot, which is often the lot of a socially constructed position in a capitalist economic society, some of the politicians blame the immigrants. This has been going on forever and we can choose whether to wise up or be willingly thick about this.
Willingly thick, wilfully cynical people who fake a commoners stance and affect a disgruntlement to appeal to some anxious, depressed, alienated, angry people, to manipulate them for gain, are ten a penny these days and are thriving right now, it’s a lucrative game. Nigel Farage, Russell Brand, Morrissey, what got into you? while ceaselessly courting the international fascist corpus, sharing that stage with Jim Davidson and Ann Widdecombe and a chorus line of horribles, this is your revolution, your self loathing manifest in lumpen form.
Brexit Davros.
In the mid 80s the National Front came to Stockport, they didn’t last long, they were told to go away, to get back on the train. There was a time when some thought that the fascists were spent, that they had humiliated themselves enough but they will always be here as long as this economic system prevails, as long as they are needed by that system.
My great grandfather, whose record of fighting fascists in Manchester is exemplary, said in his autobiography, ‘Fighting Through Life’,that:
‘Complacency is a curse.’
Bloody immigrants! My great Grandparents, Joe Toole of proud Irish descent and Margaret Dearden from Texas.
The planet is in a bad way, the climate crisis is very real, so many people, institutions, habitats, eco-systems, are at crisis point and the antagonists and enemies of our humanity are in plain sight. If you really care about ‘the children’ and want to preserve and protect a future, then the fight is not against other people, it is against sadistic, nihilistic, social systems. Can we grow a different way and find common cause in the tending of the planet as a whole? There’s something very radical in the idea of an opposition to nihilism, something powerful in the rejection of transactional relationships, it is a bold stance to give and keep giving, a gift of deliverance from social meaning and economic value to something akin to a nature state, a futuristic rewilding of the self.
it was all about the vibes
the moss garden 
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