Manchester's real problems
This city’s been falling apart for years and everyone can see it:
Homelessness everywhere, people failed at every step by the systems that were supposed to help them.
A council that’s underfunded, occasional corrupt, and often incompetent.
Roads that are a wreck, litter and vandalism everywhere, fly tipping left to rot.
Post-pandemic selfishness and carelessness like nobody gives a toss about living in a shared place.
Rising poverty and joblessness.
Piccadilly gardens terrifying visitors and locals
Gentrification and bad planning doubling (or even tripling) rents, and house prices through the roof
Buses run by drivers with barely any experience, a danger to everyone else on the road.
Infrastructure that’s crap and crumbling.
GPs collapsing under systemic failure, leaving the most desperate with no mental health support at all, and at best the bare minimum of reactive healthcare that usually comes years later than it should, if at all.
Streets full of comatose druggies, almost all of them locals, abandoned by the same systems that were meant to stop this happening.
These are the actual problems. The things that make life worse for people here every single day. Instead the noise is all about “stop the boats.”, despite immigration costs being barely 2%-3% (much less, like way below 1% if you only consider 'illegals' or 'irregular migration' if you prefer corpo-speak) of the budget.
The flag-shaggers terrorising immigrants in this city aren’t helping — they’re making everything worse. We can’t do anything about the boats, we don’t control where they come from. And yeah, asylum needs fixing — but it should be funded centrally, not dumped on local councils that can’t even fix a pothole after years of Tory cuts. And it sure as hell shouldn’t be public money lining hotel chains’ pockets to lock vulnerable people up like prisoners.
The whole thing is just a wedge issue. A distraction. Designed to keep people snapping at each other while the real enemies — the corporate interests and wealth hoarders — strip this city bare and laugh at us for falling for it.
Labour came in promising to help people, and just ran riot over the country with more Tory-lite policy, keeping their gerry-mandering and mandatory photo ID discouraging poorer voters from having any say in change. It's not surprising Reform are gaining ground because we're ALL sick of it, wherever you land on the political spectrum.
Instead of screaming at each other over boats we can’t control, we should be screaming at the people who do control things here: the ones running this city into the ground. Demand better housing, proper funding for people who need it most, working public services, safe roads, real mental health care. That’s not left or right, and certainly not a 'culture' problem.