The Sound of September

The geese fly without paperwork. Families like mine don’t. On the Mersey, migration is physics and cooperation; in Westminster, it’s theatre and menace. And here on the Wirral, the chorus includes a Reform chair with a history we should remember.

The sound comes before the light. It slides in under the window and along the floorboards, a low conversational murmur that swells into a chorus, the way an audience gathers before a play. I step outside and the promenade is still half-asleep, and there they are—geese, strung like writing across the sky, a sentence with no full stop. They come down the Mersey from the Irish Sea, from Deeside’s wetlands, hugging the Wirral coast as if following an old memory. Every September this happens and every September it is the same living metronome ticking the season over. Keep your calendars; the year turns when their voices arrive.

Yesterday two huge V’s scrawled their way inland, the geometry so precise it felt like a secret military drill. Of course it isn’t that. It’s older and simpler. One bird takes the drag while the others rest in the lift, then they rotate. What looks like perfection is generosity. The physics is the morality: each wingbeat makes the next wingbeat cheaper. There are no passports. No counters. No “indefinite leave to remain” with an asterisk. The sky is a commons they’ve never been taught to fear.

In our house, mornings begin with a quieter audit: what have we done, what must we keep, what proof will be needed next? I know the exact number—£28,000. Not “tens of thousands,” not “eye-watering fees,” a very specific stack of receipts sat on the table like an altar to bureaucracy. We came back at the end of 2022 for reasons both practical and intimate: to look after my parents so the state wouldn’t have to; to put our backs under the weight that family puts on you if you’re any use at all. We did it the way Britain tells you to if you want to belong—legally, patiently, expensively. Three children in the fold—two step-sons and one son who carries two passports and the casual grace of those who haven’t yet learned to worry about borders.

And yet here we are, listening to a politics that treats belonging like an introductory offer you can cancel from head office. This week’s noise—Reform blowing hard on the idea that ILR isn’t really indefinite—lands like a draft under the door. The practical advice is obvious: keep the documents tidy, double-check the route, take legal counsel, write to the MP. The emotional truth is simpler. The geese move because the air tells them to go. We perform the opposite trick: we’re told to stand very still while the air changes around us.

This is what fear looks like in a respectable postcode: not panic, but an erosion of planning. The long term shrinks. You buy differently. You postpone. You speak in a new tense—the conditional—where the future is never a promise, only a maybe. Rules are supposed to convert futures into decisions. When rules wobble, decisions wobble, and families wobble with them. That isn’t ideological; it’s behavioural. People need reliability to invest. They need a story that stays true long enough to make the next chapter worth writing.

The party that should say this out loud—the one that claims families as the point of the whole exercise—has developed a ventriloquist’s act. If Reform barks, Labour growls to prove it can. If Reform shoves the window rightward, Labour dutifully slides the furniture to the “new centre” and calls it prudence. Competing on your opponent’s frame is how you lose your voice. If you want to look strong, defend the dependable. Make a virtue of keeping promises. Celebrate the dull heroism of rules that stay put.

And yet politics isn’t only Westminster. It’s also the ward meeting, the leaflet, the local face of national bluster. On Wirral, that face belongs to David Burgess-Joyce, now Reform’s branch chair. Voters deserve the short memory-jog: as a Conservative councillor in 2019 he compared David Lammy’s impact on cohesion to “any KKK member,” was suspended, and later apologised before being allowed back; the remarks were widely condemned and became a running sore in local politics. In 2022 he was deselected by the local Conservatives; the episode underlined a pattern—heat first, judgement later.

The pattern continued at council: during a 2023 budget meeting he lobbed an allegation that Lib Dems had taken “bribes,” then rowed back under pressure and issued an apology. Whatever one’s rosette, that’s not serious stewardship—it’s petrol on the carpet. Add in the longer backstory: his departure from the Serious Organised Crime Agency was reported as a misconduct dismissal (which he denies, saying he retired for ill-health); the National Crime Agency confirmed the dismissal at the time, and he has long called it a smear. Readers can weigh the official line against his rebuttal, but the point is stability of character—not just volume of complaint.

Why dwell on one local figure? Because rhetoric has a supply chain. National shock-jocks rely on local amplifiers—people who turn slogans into ward-level menace. If you’ve paid into Britain in good faith, built a life here, and are following the five-year route, the last thing you need is a local microphone telling you “indefinite” is conditional and decency is negotiable. And if Labour is tempted to meet that microphone with a bigger speaker rather than a better argument—stretching five to ten years to look “tough”—then the brand called Britain becomes a counterfeit note. You can pass it off once, maybe twice; eventually, shopkeepers check the watermark.

Sometimes I think the most subversive act is refusing the audition. When I say “we could just leave,” people hear a threat. It isn’t. It’s consumer behaviour. If you treat residency like a subscription with hidden clauses, don’t be surprised when customers churn. Migration is agency. The geese aren’t fleeing; they’re optimising. They’re not at war with winter; they’ve struck a truce with it. They don’t need bravery because they have coordination.

Still, I don’t want to fly. We came back for parents who deserve the dignity of old age with familiar voices in the room. We came back because “home” is a word that outlasts prime ministers. We came back as a bet that Britain still knows how to be Britain. So yes, I’ll organise, write, escalate, do the boring admin and the loud public bits. I’ll press the same simple question until it’s answered clearly: will Labour honour the five-year route for those already on it and refuse to move the goalposts in a panic? That—more than any posture—would sound like strength.

By then the geese will have traced and retraced the same invisible roadways over the river a dozen times. My son will be older, the step-sons taller, my parents softer around the edges of memory, and the Home Office receipts will still exist as proof we believed what we were told. If the sky is generous, we’ll still be here—not because we begged, but because promises held. If not, the horizon has names, and our family knows how to travel. I would rather choose to stay than be pushed to go. I would rather applaud the play than walk out. But if the theatre keeps threatening to change the ending after I’ve paid for the tickets, I’ll take my family outside, where the real story continues without permission.

Another skein passes overhead, conversational as ever, and their logic works on me: move together; share the cost; ignore nonsense on the ground. The sound of September isn’t departure; it’s competence. It’s a system that works because it never pretends to be anything other than what it is. I want my country to be at least as wise as a flock of geese. I want my politics to be at least as honest as physics. And I want, more than anything, for my children to grow up in a place where “indefinite” means what it says.

RW