The women of Piddington are being thrown to the wolves

Over the past few months, the quiet Oxfordshire village of Piddington, population just 350, has become the unlikely flashpoint of Britain’s immigration crisis. Locals are so furious about plans to turn the nearby Bicester Garrison into accommodation for asylum seekers that they will today hold a non-binding referendum on whether to secede from the UK.

If the proposals to house around 1,250 asylum seekers there go ahead, the population of Piddington will be artificially inflated by a staggering 400 per cent. As pointed out by parish chairman Tim McNally, this is the proportional equivalent of adding 32million people to London overnight. Piddington’s residents will be outnumbered by nearly four to one. As if that weren’t bad enough, a recent Home Office document suggests that the true capacity of the local barracks may actually be 3,500. If these were fully utilised, migrants would then outnumber locals by a staggering 10 to one.

Worse still, Piddington’s women will be outnumbered by a significantly larger margin. Based on the lower capacity estimate of the Bicester Garrison, females would account for roughly eight per cent (about one in 12 people) of the total population, and around three per cent (about one in 29 people) under the higher capacity figures. In no other area of the UK can such a dramatic gender split be found.

Understandably, this impending shift has caused great anxiety among female residents. Last week campaign group Women of Piddington published an open letter addressed to the UK’s female MPs, warning that ‘Life as we know it will be destroyed’.

‘As fellow women, you will understand the serious risks this will expose us to. Our safety, our security and our freedoms will be under threat… We will not feel safe walking our streets. We are already living in fear.’

The letter was accompanied by a video, featuring the ordinary mothers, wives and daughters of Piddington urging female MPs to see sense. ‘You’ll destroy this place’, one woman says frankly. ‘We are begging you [for help]’, says another.

No doubt there will be attempts to cast the women participating in this campaign as racists. Yet there is no shortage of cases of women and girls being subjected to violent and sexual assaults by men who have no legal right to be in Britain in the first place. Many will recall Ethiopian national Hadush Kebatu, a resident of the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, who sparked months of protest after sexually assaulting a teen girl and an adult woman a week after arriving. Or Ahmad Mulakhil of Afghanistan, who abducted and raped a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.

Similarly horrific incidents have created a steady drumbeat of grim headlines in recent years: ‘Two Afghan teens found guilty of raping a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa’; ‘Sudanese man murders Walsall asylum hotel worker with a screwdriver’; ‘Asylum seeker guilty of park rape in Nottinghamshire jailed’. At what point is it acceptable to point out the obvious? Concentrating large numbers of male asylum seekers in small communities clearly creates urgent safeguarding concerns for women and children.

In a sane world, it wouldn’t be a surprise that men arriving in droves from places like Afghanistan, Eritrea and Iran might not possess the kind of liberal attitude towards the opposite sex we would hope for. Many have been socialised in environments where women are, to put it mildly, treated like garbage.

It should go without saying that belonging to a particular ethnic group does not inherently make one more likely to commit a violent sexual crime. Yet when men are arriving in droves from countries that the government advises women not to travel to, problems are inevitable. These men are unlikely to gain a moral software update the moment they reach the Kent coastline. Placing thousands of such men together on the outskirts of a tiny English village only compounds the insanity.

Former Conservative minister Edwina Currie said the quiet part out loud last month, when she suggested that, ‘The obvious thing that 1,200 young men are going to need… is a brothel’. While we can only hope her remark was a throwaway joke, it speaks to the grotesque logic underlying the current crisis. Indeed, as far as the government and the Home Office are concerned, the state’s primary duty is to provide for the ‘needs’ of primarily male illegal migrants. The interests of British citizens – and women in particular – are barely an afterthought, if they even are thought of at all.

It is parliament’s ‘duty to act’, the Women of Piddington state in their open letter. ‘There are no safeguards in place. You will be complicit. You will be to blame’, it says. ‘We are issuing an urgent call for you to stand up for the Women of Piddington.’

There is little room for evasion here. The British government can either take the concerns of women seriously or it can continue hiding behind platitudes about ‘vulnerable’ asylum seekers needing our protection. Continued silence on the threat the migration crisis poses to women is an unforgivable act of cowardice.