Piddington: roar of the Waitrose mums

That sound you hear in the distance is the roar of the Waitrose mums. Piddington, a tiny, well-to-do village in Oxfordshire, has voted to secede from the United Kingdom over government plans to stick 1,256 male illegal migrants on a nearby military base. When and if they arrive, the newcomers will dwarf the 350-strong Piddington population by four to one. Long the preserve of the working classes, opposition to asylum policy is now reaching into the ‘centrist’ Home Counties. And all it took was for them to be personally affected by it.

The vote is purely symbolic, of course. The rebels of Piddington aren’t about to erect border posts or seize the post office. Not yet, at least. But what a signal it sends. The newly dubbed Principality of Piddington represents a broadening of the public agitation against the small-boats crisis, and it will be emulated elsewhere. Rebel leader Tim McNally, chairman of Piddington parish council, has said hundreds of councillors from across the country, keen to resist the imposition of asylum accommodation on their own areas, have been in contact with him to discuss the Piddington ‘blueprint’.

That Piddingtonians fought back through the ballot box is telling. Asylum policy has become an affront to democracy, national and local. The potential repurposing of Bicester barracks was announced over the heads of residents and their representatives, via Crown-estate powers that blindsided the council. McNally says the village was given just 10 days to respond to a 1,000-page planning document for the site. In its desperation to close migrant hotels and force richer areas to take their ‘fair share’, Labour is succeeding only in spreading public fury with the asylum system more evenly across the country and the income brackets.

You might say that voters in places like Piddington, represented by a Lib Dem MP, are finally being confronted with the consequences of their own ‘liberal’ worldview. Then again, one of the underappreciated things about borderless Britain is that practically everyone opposes it. According to one survey, 73 per cent of the public are concerned about illegal migration, and they’re increasingly open to tougher measures on asylum seekers: another poll found that 57 per cent think illegal entrants should be detained upon arrival.

One can easily imagine Piddington residents, not too long ago, gathered round the Aga and tutting at the ‘far-right thugs’ protesting outside of migrant hotels. Even now, in the voxpops from the area, you can detect a desire not to be lumped in with ‘that lot’. Naturally, the mainstream-media coverage of Piddington has been infuriatingly more sympathetic than that of last summer’s uprising in affluent but geezerish Epping, in Essex, home of the east London working-class-done-good.

Some will say the Piddington revolt is just NIMBYism, the default setting of rural Lib Dem land. Many of the residents’ arguments have tended to stress the sheer impracticality of the situation, putting so many migrants on the doorstep of such a small place, rather than the injustice and risk created by the entire system. But others have been essentially identical from those heard from anti-asylum activists elsewhere. The safety of women and children has been front and centre, with a Women of Piddington video going viral and a letter sent to all female MPs, of which only four bothered to respond. The language might be a little more euphemistic, the accents a little more proper, but clearly Piddington’s women do not want the harassment and sexual assault that inevitably follows inviting in hundreds of young men from less-than-feminist countries. (The government still pretends this isn’t happening, even as it issues leaflets to migrants informing them that rape, child abuse and FGM just aren’t cricket in Blighty.)

So long as our leaders believe that their obligations to men who have broken into the country trump the democratic wishes and safety of citizens, the asylum crisis will continue. But Piddington’s declaration of independence remains a stunning rebuke to a government whose latest genius solution is to spread the problem out a little more evenly. The British people’s revolt against open-borders lunacy is growing. The aggy working classes led the way, and the irked middle classes might finally be catching up. The Waitrose mums. The Stone Island dads. The Pink Ladies in Epping. The Ladies of Piddington. If they ever got themselves together, they might just save Britain.