Piddington Stands Alone – But Not for Long?
And now, they say, they are gaining support from elsewhere.
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph ahead of their secession vote, key figures in the Piddington campaign told that newspaper that other towns and villages across Great Britain were considering a similar course.
Tim McNally, chairman of the local parish council, told the paper the campaign had been working behind the scenes with other communities that felt ignored and poorly represented, and questioned how British politics had allowed the situation to arise.
He said the blueprint had attracted more than 500 inquiries from parish and town councillors across the UK, and that the referendum was intended to encourage them to follow Piddington’s example.
“A single village expressing dissatisfaction can easily be dismissed,” McNally argued. “Multiple communities independently holding properly organised democratic discussions and recording their results create something different.”
Should McNally’s somewhat quixotic dream of dozens of British towns and villages holding votes to secede from the United Kingdom come to pass, it certainly would be notable – but might it actually change anything?
Is the Labour Government Being Fiendishly Clever?
In one sense, the government running the United Kingdom is being fiendishly clever: across the UK, until now, the areas that have borne the brunt of immigration have been primarily working-class, urban and less well-off localities. Or, to describe them another way: places where Labour voters live.
Piddington, by contrast, is in the leafy Oxfordshire constituency of Bicester and Woodstock, traditionally a seat contested between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Other proposed locations for major migrant centers under the Labour government follow a similar pattern.
Crowborough, in Sussex, for example, is the site of another major migrant camp. That village is in the constituency of Sussex Weald, long a safe Conservative seat. Another is Wethersfield in Essex, in the Braintree constituency of Conservative frontbencher James Cleverly.
A conspiracy to move migrant accommodation away from working-class Labour seats and into Conservative and Reform heartlands would never, of course, be formally admitted by the British government – but the pattern is not hard to discern. And it has, for Labour, a happy side effect: for all that the locals in these areas might register their political discontent via symbolic votes to leave the UK, the political impact on the Labour Party should be negligible. These areas were voting for the opposition already.
A Potent Issue – and No Longer Only in Cities
Of course, none of this means that immigration does not remain a potent issue for the Labour government. Small-boat arrivals from France remain a daily feature of British political life, and migration features at the top of the “important to you” lists in almost all polling.
The precise location of migrant accommodation will not matter much while immigration remains a national issue and Reform UK continues to campaign on it. Indeed, scandals like Piddington could hurt Labour nationally by pitting “the plucky villagers” against the might of the state and giving Nigel Farage potent examples with which to argue that communities previously insulated from the effects of migration are getting a taste of what lies ahead under Labour.
But as politicians across Europe have learned, migrant accommodation is a particularly potent issue with the potential to seriously damage politicians in areas disproportionately affected. Making sure that one’s opponents bear the brunt of the local impact while protecting one’s own voters is the kind of solution that a partisan mind is tempted to embrace – and the UK’s Labour Party has never been short on partisan minds.
Urban Britons can also fairly note that it is they, rather than places like Piddington, who have already borne most of the burden imposed by the demand for migrant accommodation. Many British towns have seen hotels taken over by the government, for example, and the pressure on schools, housing and services is always higher – and therefore more acute – in urban areas.
Further, the historic pattern of migration into the UK has long had a disproportionate impact on Labour-voting areas. The most ethnically diverse parts of the UK can be reliably mapped onto the most working-class areas: towns like Bradford, Burnley, Leeds and Coventry, for example, historic Labour strongholds, are also those that have been most transformed by migration.
Until now, it was places like Piddington that had been left largely unchanged: white, leafy, peaceful and middle class.
Is there an active conspiracy to change that? Probably not. But the shift shows that the UK’s migrant and migration debate is no longer confined to the margins of society, but is now reaching the very communities that had for years ignored it because it did not affect them.
Piddington, and places like it, are now affected. And, as Tuesday’s vote shows, they do not like it very much.
