After Piddington, can anything stop illegal immigration?

If you want to see what the Labour government thinks about the British public, and where its true priorities lie, then there is no better place to start than leafy Piddington. This tiny Oxfordshire village, with a population of just 350, will soon be forced to welcome around 1,250 mostly male ‘asylum seekers’. UK communities secretary Angela Rayner has confirmed she will use emergency powers to override the furious local opposition and will fast-track the conversion of a former military barracks into accommodation for illegal immigrants.

The Piddington asylum camp confirms that, whatever Labour ministers may say in public, providing for illegal immigrants is their overriding concern. And there is no amount of public anger, legal challenges or difficult headlines that will ever get in their way. Indeed, the very Crown powers Rayner has used to grant planning permission to the camp are only indended, as the BBC puts it, for ‘urgently needed’ projects of exceptional ‘national importance’. Clearly, housing over a thousand illegal immigrants really is of such importance to the Labour Party.

The case against the Piddington camp is so overwhelming and obvious that it is incredible it needs to be stated. Villagers will soon be outnumbered by illegal immigrants by four to one. Women in Piddington will be outnumbered by eight to one. Anyone who so much as glances at a newspaper will understand the dangers here. Every single man in the camp will have arrived in Britain illegally. None will have faced any serious vetting. Many will come from countries that are so misogynistic the Foreign Office advises women not to travel there. The new arrivals will likely even be given one of the Home Office’s new guidebooks, asking them not to rape, sexually abuse or harass any women or children they encounter. Downing Street’s insistence that the safety of locals is its ‘top priority’ is an insult to the nation’s intelligence. It is about to spend £250million on a project that is all but guaranteed to make Piddington less safe.

The fact that even the Piddingtonians are to have a migrant camp foisted on them is especially disheartening. Their campaigns have been well-organised, disciplined and eye-catching. The symbolic referendum, in which residents voted overwhelmingly to declare independence from the United Kingdom in protest against the migrant camp, hit international headlines. The fears of local women, as expressed in a local letter to all female MPs, had a similarly outsized impact on the migration debate. Senior figures from Reform UK and the Tories have visited the village, hoping to bolster the locals’ campaign and embarrass the Labour Party. Yet none of this has made the slightest dent in the government’s determination to house illegal migrants here.

Legal challenges have also borne little fruit, so far at least. Locals had hoped that the presence of great crested newts and barbastelle bats near the site of the planned asylum camp might at least slow down its approval. Indeed, in recent years, the discovery of protected species has torpedoed, delayed and added eye-watering costs to countless infrastructure projects that are genuinely of ‘national importance’, including high-speed rail links, nuclear power stations and housing developments. Alas, when it comes to the Piddington camp, not even the immovable object England’s notorously stringent planning laws can counteract the unstoppable force of illegal immigration. Piddington’s parish-council chairman, Tim McNally, has vowed further legal challenges following Rayner’s decision, but I wouldn’t fancy his chances by now.

Then there is the class dimension. For good or ill, Piddington’s revolting residents have been given a far more sympathetic hearing than similar anti-migrant protesters. The Lululemon mums in rural Oxfordshire have been taken far more seriously than the Pink Ladies of Epping. The Lib Dem-voting residents have largely been spared the usual smears of ‘racist’ and ‘far right’ that have been levelled at anti-asylum protesters in places like Crowborough, Taunton, Gosport and Portsmouth. But even this hasn’t helped their cause.

In fact, the leafiness of Piddington has actually been held against it. UK prime minister Andy Burnham has argued that ‘we cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers’, adding that ‘all parts of the country’ need to ‘play their part’. Now, it is obviously a problem that the poorest parts of Britain are disproportionately burdened by the asylum crisis (a Guardian analysis in 2021 found that almost one in four state-supported asylum seekers were housed in just 10 local authorities, nine of which were among the most deprived in the UK). The answer to this is surely to start securing the borders, rather than dispersing thousands of illegal immigrants into the Waitrose belt.

When protesters as well-heeled and well-organised as the Piddingtonians are unable to have their voices heard, what hope is there for the rest of us? Britons have taken almost every opportunity to register their displeasure with out-of-control immigration at the ballot box. Polls routinely find that opposition to illegal migration cuts across party lines and class divides. And yet the government still uses every power at its disposal, not to stop the boats, but to accommodate an endless influx of arrivals. If there were any lingering doubt, Piddington proves it: the well-being of illegal immigrants trumps the safety, rights and democratic voice of British citizens at every turn.