A “polite, posh revolt” has broken out in an Oxfordshire village over plans to turn an old army site into new housing for more than 1,000 asylum seekers, wrote Ella Whelan in The iPaper.
Residents of Piddington voted to become independent from the UK in a symbolic referendum and now the parish has been “approached by hundreds of other villages and towns for advice on replicating their campaign”, said Leaf Arbuthnot in The Telegraph.
Grumbling Piddington
It’s “such a quiet, tranquil village” that the most you could ordinarily expect at 7am would be a cyclist “setting off for an early shift, or a milkman on his round”, said Arbuthnot. But when the referendum result was delivered, the atmosphere in Piddington was “nothing short of electric”.
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The village’s 350 residents had been invited to cast their ballot in a small box outside the village hall and out of 312 votes cast, 285 voted to leave, there were 26 no votes, and one spoiled ballot paper.
As the landslide result was announced, residents were “palpably delighted”. The village’s “eccentric and deeply English decision to gun for a figurative ‘split’ from the UK has won it extensive coverage, even from media outlets overseas”.
Piddington had actually been “quietly grumbling for a while” about the plans, wrote Whelan, but now those grumbles are “headline news”, and residents are posing with home-made signs boasting their neighbourhood is “the village that roars”.
“The case of Piddington is fascinating” because residents voted in Calum Miller, a Liberal Democrat candidate, in 2024 and “you don’t vote in a Lib Dem if you’re agnostic on the issue of immigration”. Miller had previously backed calls to make Oxfordshire “a place of sanctuary for those fleeing torture and death”, but he has since written a letter to the government, opposing the new plans.
Piddington is about the “much bigger question of what is at stake with the issue of immigration”. Ten years ago, “even using the I word” could have you labelled racist, but “concerns about cultural tensions, NHS waiting lists and even crime rates are now pretty commonplace across the political spectrum”.
Backlog burden
The government has defended its migration policy after the symbolic referendum. “What I would just gently say to the people of Piddington is we inherited a massive asylum backlog,” Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, told Sky News. The government is “getting that backlog down” but “in the meantime”, it doesn’t think it’s “acceptable for all of the burden” to fall on poorer communities.
But Labour MPs “would do well to study what has happened in Piddington”, said Arbuthnot, because “the anger that has been stirred in even this conspicuously well-to-do and liberal corner of Oxfordshire could augur a broader mood taking hold across the country”.
Andy Burnham has “sold himself as the ‘I hear you’ prime minister", said Whelan, so “will he listen to the Piddington Poll”?
