Restore Britain campaigner Montgomery Toms picked Manchester’s Curry Mile to film an anti-migration video ahead of Thursday’s Greater Manchester mayoral election. Bold choice, in hindsight.
Standing on Wilmslow Road in Rusholme, Toms told viewers: “I went to Manchester’s famous ‘Curry Mile,’ a street that has been transformed by mass migration.” He added: “At Restore Britain, we will reverse mass migration. We need your vote to deliver radical change,” before asking people to vote for the party’s candidate, Marlon West.
The Curry Mile isn’t exactly new
Toms framed the area as some recent, unwelcome shift. It’s been there since the 1950s and 60s, when South Asian cafés and restaurants first opened around Rusholme, largely started by people who’d come to work in Manchester’s factories and textile mills. By the 1970s, Rusholme was already an established centre of the city’s South Asian community, and its restaurants had started pulling in customers from across Manchester, students especially.
It’s kept evolving since, Middle Eastern restaurants, dessert shops, shisha cafés, supermarkets have all joined the original curry houses. What hasn’t changed is its place in Manchester’s own identity. Visit Manchester calls it a “historic culinary landmark,” tracing it back to families who arrived from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in the 1950s. It’s promoted to tourists as an attraction, not held up anywhere as evidence something’s gone wrong.
People clocked the problem immediately
Plenty of replies pointed out the obvious: campaigning against the Curry Mile in Manchester is a bit like turning up in Liverpool to complain about the Beatles.
@bobbuisjohnson: “I think ‘get rid of curry’ is going to be an incredibly hard sell to be honest mate.” @archer_rs: “It’s rare to see a man scared of curry restaurants but here’s one. What a weak, weak man.”
The real issue was that Toms clearly hadn’t understood how people in Manchester actually feel about the area, it’s not seen as something imposed on the city, it’s just part of the city. @CityBlue: “No way you’re framing Manchester’s Curry Mile as a bad thing???? Christ, it ain’t half obvious you’re not from Manchester.” @real_bogdweller called it “a beloved part of Manchester’s culture and history” and asked what the campaign thought it was actually achieving.
The food angle got its own round of jokes too. @narindertweets: “Imagine telling people of a country where chicken tikka is the national dish that Indian restaurants are bad.” Chicken tikka masala’s exact origins are still disputed, but Robin Cook famously called it a “true British national dish” back in 2001, specifically as an example of how migration has shaped British food culture. Not exactly fertile ground for this particular argument.
‘What else are you standing against?’
Some replies went straight for the political logic of it all. @DomFarrell1986: “That anti Curry Mile ticket is a tough sell in Manchester, chief. What else were you standing against? Oasis? Football? Big coats?” @WorldFamousHot1 pointed out, more colourfully, that the Curry Mile had been around a lot longer than Toms had been alive.
@Shaunage325 made the same point more directly: “The guy is 21. He’s been on the planet for two minutes and yet is trying to claim that an area of Manchester that has been there for decades and is widely celebrated by the people there is some product of this ‘takeover’ that’s supposedly occurred over the last few years.”
Others questioned why a mayoral campaign was focused on culture-war material at all rather than anything the mayor actually controls. @KateFlood suggested Restore Britain might’ve had better luck talking about transport in south Manchester: “Instead of this divisive nonsense that serves absolutely nobody, what about giving south Manchester proper transport links,” pointing out that’s at least something a mayor could actually be judged on. Transport is genuinely one of the mayor’s biggest responsibilities, alongside the Bee Network, policing, housing, planning and economic development.
West’s actual campaign covered public services, grooming-gang investigations, spending and transport. Before the vote, YouGov had him on roughly 7% of first preferences, behind Labour, Reform, the Greens and the Conservatives.
An advert for the exact thing it was meant to attack
The strangest part of the whole video was that the Curry Mile looked genuinely lively behind him the entire time. A bus passing, people moving between shops and restaurants, nothing that looked remotely like collapse or disorder. Just a busy high street full of independent businesses and people going about their day.
For anyone not already on board with Restore Britain’s argument, the footage did a better job selling the Curry Mile than condemning it.
Manchester’s Curry Mile exists because generations of migrants opened businesses, employed people, and turned a stretch of Wilmslow Road into something recognised across the country. People are entitled to their own views on current immigration levels. Pretending the Curry Mile itself is some recent development just means ignoring most of its actual history.
Toms went to Rusholme to show what migration had supposedly done to Manchester. Most of the replies made clear plenty of Mancunians already knew the answer: it helped build one of the city’s best-known streets.
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