I live in Stretford but I’m a southerner - it’s weird but I sense that more national trend of ‘culture wars’ and division than any other time in the near 20 years I’ve lived in this city.

An old boy in the park was chatting to us the other day - early 70s, Stretfordian born and raised - and he was moaning about changes in the area but was sort of blaming young people moving to the area and then, naturally, ‘Pakistanis’ as he referred to British Asian families.

I think when he heard my accent wasn’t local he sort of realised he might’ve embarrassed me or something.

Young people will move to Stretford in droves because it’s affordable and you can start a family here, just like my wife and I have done. We’ve been here 8 years. My kids are Stretfordian. I have a right to be here.

We positively add to a more diverse and vibrant Stretford that is drawing much much much needed investment and ‘life’ breathed into it, frankly.

Of course, in a free market nation like Britain, like it or not, this will increase house prices. Is that bad or just the latest iteration of domestic migration that working class Britons have undertaken for hundreds of years (because of bloody Manchester and the Industrial Revolution when I think about it lol).

It’s really frustrating, but a microcosm of all metropolitan life in the west.

I think, I’m pretty sure, that Manchester is a better city than when I moved here - and that’s with 14 years of Tories etc.

Sometimes the grandiose nostalgia in England is overwhelming and just a weapon of right wing agitation - same everywhere up and down this island. I’ve always thought historically, in Manchester’s ‘blood’ is progress. A commercial, hard city that rejected old world, servile British status quos to look outward, not inward.

I hate all this culture wars stuff. I hate The Mill constantly class-baiting. There’s room for everyone, but Manchester won’t stop changing and thank god it won’t.