A small English village has voted to leave the United Kingdom in protest against the government’s plans to build a large asylum centre on the edge of the settlement, which campaigners say puts local women and girls at risk.
Piddington in Oxfordshire, England, voted by an overwhelming majority to leave the United Kingdom and become an independent “Principality” in a local referendum on Monday, according to results announced on the doorstep of the village hall on Tuesday morning. Of 312 votes cast — a turnout of 92 per cent — some 285 voted to “secede from the UK and pursue self-determination”, with 26 against.
Tim McNally, the chairman of Piddington parish council, said: “It is a message to the Government that you are going to have to change. You are going to have to grow into our way of thinking… We are formerly the village known as Piddington. Today we are to be known as the principality of Piddington and we will be putting up a sign to that effect”.
It has previously been reported that the villagers have made representations to U.S. President Donald Trump for aid, and the village has offered to rename itself “Trumpington” if the U.S. will accept it as the 51st State. The decision to hold the referendum was announced on July 4th, and it was held on September 15th, Battle of Britain memorial day.
The village said they are now considering issuing their own I.D. cards and electing officials for the government of the Principality.
The symbolic vote — self-called independence referenda have no legal weight in the United Kingdom — is in response to the government’s revived plan to convert a former British Army garrison next to the village, Ordnance Depot Bicester, into a camp for newly-arrived self-professed refugees and other migrants. Officially, the camp would be for 1,256 male arrivals, but recently unearthed government planning documents state that capacity has at times been considered as high as 3,500, ten times the population of Piddington.
Until now, the thousands of migrant arrivals have been dispersed around the country in so-called migrant hotels, which has led to considerable public disquiet, concentrated hotspots of migrant crime, and protests. Britain’s Labour government decided the problem wasn’t Britain’s open borders, but simply the hotels, and has embarked on a policy of spreading the arrivals around the country instead, in the hope this will please the public.
Responding to the vote on Tuesday morning, the government said that while they appreciated the concerns of the residents, it remained their policy that the status quo of always placing migrants in poor areas because the cheap property there was the best value for money for taxpayers had to end, and middle-class areas would now “do their bit”.
Minister Lisa Nandy said: “We don’t think it’s acceptable for all of the burden of shouldering not just asylum accommodation, but also many other forms of temporary accommodation, to fall on poorer communities”.
The displacement of migrants to wealthier areas by the present British government is one of the first tests of the tolerance of areas that, voting data shows, generally vote for pro-open-borders parties but have generally been far enough removed from the consequences of their politics to avoid consequences. Piddington itself, for instance — outside of its campaigning to avoid having a large migrant camp erected on its doorstep — is politically dominated by the Liberal Democrats, a “refugees welcome here” party.
Former Conservative government minister Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park reflected this reality in a statement where he observed that the local councillors for Piddington are Liberal Democrats, the local Member of Parliament is a Liberal Democrat, and noted the local Liberal Democrat party group “voted for their area to become a ‘Council of Sanctuary’… their motion also called for repeal of the Illegal Migration Act & Nationality and Borders Act, and stated that asylum seekers should be housed ‘as our neighbours’.”
The Tory lawmaker added, “What did local voters expect would happen?”
Read the full article here