Rebellion in a tiny English village reveals Burnham’s peril on migration

PIDDINGTON, England — Few would suspect this sedate village north of Oxford, population 350, is on the front line of Britain’s immigration battles.

But the signs marking entry into the newly-established “principality” — fresh from a headline-grabbing vote to symbolically secede from the U.K. — tell a different story.

A father and son visiting from the island of Jersey posed for pictures and brandished their passports as they crossed a white picket fence. They joked that they were immigrating here.

The village’s declaration of “independence” from the rest of the U.K. came in a symbolic referendum, which took aim at the use of a military barracks on Piddington’s periphery to house up to 1,250 asylum seekers. The result was an overwhelming 285 in favor of leaving the U.K., with just 26 villagers opting to remain.

Now this very British protest threatens to spread to other shires. It has become a magnet for Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s critics — handing them fresh ammunition to use against him as they push to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

All the while, Britain’s far-right is threatening to shift attention away from the watery frontier of the English Channel toward “defending” Piddington from newcomers. That raises the prospect of unwanted, balaclava-wearing activists descending on an otherwise tranquil village.

Tea and trouble

When POLITICO headed down rural roads to reach the bucolic breakaway “state” this week, Kemi Badenoch was there by pure coincidence. The Conservative Party leader was following a line of right-wingers pledging their support for this tiny patch of Middle England in revolt.

Over plates of biscuits and mugs of tea in the small village hall that has been the nerve center of this pseudo-secessionist movement, Badenoch listens attentively to the fears of the more than 40 assembled local women.

And she leans in to the darkest fears the villagers harbor. Not only is this about migration, she said, but it’s a “huge safeguarding risk” too. She warns of a “criminal element” being housed on Piddington’s doorstep — the arrival of hundreds of men whose identities are little known, up against cherished playing fields that back onto the military base (albeit through barbed wire fencing).

Badenoch also started making her party’s abstract — and divisive — vision for leaving the ECHR a little more real in the eyes of those on the frontline. It’s a stance that she knows has struggled to find purchase among more traditional conservatives, who were divided over Brexit.

But the Conservative leader has put leaving the Convention at the heart of her plans to stop the unauthorized arrival of small boats. It comes as her party faces the threat of being eclipsed on the right of British politics by Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform UK.

It’s certainly tricky terrain for the Tories. The boat arrivals — and the asylum backlog they created — started under the last Conservative government Badenoch was a part of.

“We tried a lot of things. We kept getting stuck in the courts, and the Convention on Human Rights is the problem,” Badenoch said, while acknowledging that making this case has proved a “tougher job than you would think, despite what people see on the news each day.”

“We need something more modern,” she added as a springer spaniel cross was discreetly fed a corner of a digestive biscuit. “But the bottom line is we’re not in government, and we haven’t convinced everyone why this is important.”

There are no signs of any dissent from this corner of the countryside, which is now faced with the reality of taking their share of asylum seekers who are often housed in poorer towns and cities.

Small boat crossings of the English Channel may be down this year, but the salience of the issue isn’t. Successful crossings from France still amount to more than 17,000 people this year, so the legal duty to house them while their claims are assessed remains onerous for the state.

Here Badenoch eyes an opportunity. She told the “Piddington women” that she’ll be forcing votes on the issue in parliament — a bid to bind Labour MPs to their decision to back these sites.

As with other right-wing rivals, Badenoch has no clear answer on how to prevent MoD Bicester — the military site that has Piddington residents worried — from being turned into short-term emergency housing.

Face down or back down?

For now, that is Andy Burnham’s problem.

The Conservative government started using hotels to house thousands of migrants while their claims are assessed, but it’s the current Labour government that now must deliver on a pledge to end their use. 

The use of houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) has been met with similar outrage. And that’s why the disused MoD stock is being used, even though there are few to no facilities for asylum seekers in Piddington, bar a medieval church and a village hall that’s likely to be unwelcoming.

Refugee charities condemn the use of such bases as “inhumane,” while the right has seized on them as a poison forced on undeserving countryside communities. 

Though unlikely, ministers could still back away from Piddington, given that the village’s referendum vote fell within the consultation period during which the government must consider local objections to the proposals. But Labour MPs in the North of England, whose constituencies have long been used for asylum accommodation, are urging the government to “hold firm.”

“Yes, it could be a flashpoint. But then, so have asylum hotels been,” one of them, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told POLITICO. “So there is no perfect solution. But from a security and efficiency perspective, for both asylum seekers and settled communities, it makes sense I think to use former bases.”

Another pointed out that former mining villages in their constituency have long had asylum seekers “dumped” into their communities, helping drive up the Reform UK vote. “Now people in a lovely little village near the Cotswolds are whinging,” this MP continued. “There’s a reason why ex-military camps are happening, and it’s because communities are pissed off about hotels and HMOs — so I’m not terribly impressed.”

Even one opposition frontbencher who’s taken a keen interest in the Oxfordshire village predicted the government will have to “make an example of Piddington” — or run the risk of other MoD-adjacent villages following suit.

Plus, there’s the raw political reality that the military sites tend to be in leafier, Conservative or Liberal Democrat-voting areas, rather than the more urban sites held by Labour. 

Burnham has also made much of his desire to put power into the hands of communities as prime minister. On this issue, he may face charges of hypocrisy if he overrides local concerns in favor of national necessity.

Making noise

There are many reasons why these particular proposals — right in the heart of England’s fabled green and pleasant land — are grabbing international attention. The campaign has certainly been bolstered by its media-savvy residents, who include a television news editor and a business consultant.

Beyond the novel approach of declaring independence, the Piddington campaigners are also deploying well-worn strategies from the NIMBY playbook. These include flagging the presence of environmentally protected, gold-crested newts on the site. And a judicial review — a formal legal challenge — is in the works, too.

Then there’s the local farmer with an old friend who was an ecologist at the Environment Agency. Jo Haw-Cook, whose family has farmed the land of Piddington for more than six decades, was introduced to POLITICO as “the bat lady.”

She has been spending days around the military base using a heterodyne bat detector to pick up their ultrasonic frequencies.

She says the government has sought to claim there are no protected species of bats in the vicinity. “Well, we just blew that out the water,” she told POLITICO, purporting to have collated evidence that Barbastelle bats — listed as a priority species — are locally present. “The newts will possibly slow it down — but this one particular bat has stopped major infrastructure projects before,” she says.

The movement spreads

Perhaps the odds of bumping into a right-wing politician in Piddington weren’t so slim after all. In recent weeks, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf has dropped by, as has a key rival, Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe. Even Elon Musk has weighed in on X.

But there are unintended consequences from all this attention for the village too. 

The far-right activist Daniel Thomas, a convicted kidnapper who goes by the name Danny Tommo, has threatened to bring 5,000 men to camp around the MoD site to prevent the arrival of asylum seekers.

This is going down poorly with locals. Sandra Innes, a retired management trainer who moved to Piddington from East London two decades ago, said: “As women, that number of men descending on a village is scary, regardless. Because unfortunately when these things happen, as we’ve seen too often, you get opposing views and violence comes, and that is the last thing we actually want.”

Christina Gower, a 26-year-old graphic designer, added: “Our whole campaign is about how unsuitable it is for a massive amount of men. So we wouldn’t necessarily invite that to our village. It doesn’t make sense.”

Calum Miller, the Liberal Democrat MP for Piddington, has been pushing the Home Office for extra funding if the Patriot Platform does descend on the village, as has the local police and crime commissioner, either way. 

Tim McNally, the parish council chair who’s led the independence drive, was keen to point out they’ll accept support regardless of political affiliation, though it’s clear the focus is on helping spread his “independence” movement.

He told POLITICO that “a thousand or so” people have contacted him asking for his “blueprint.” 

On Tuesday night, representatives from the Suffolk parish of Barnham met McNally in Piddington to discuss how to hold their own referendum in opposition to similar plans for their own nearby RAF base.

Again, such a vote would be purely symbolic. But it would represent the spread of something that, for Burnham, risks becoming a much bigger show of defiance.