The barons of Bicester have raised the standard of rural revolt against Westminster.
Residents of Piddington, Oxfordshire, have voted to leave the United Kingdom in protest at government plans to accommodate asylum seekers at a nearby military site. The illegal referendum produced 285 votes for the new ‘Principality of Piddington’, 26 against and one spoiled ballot: a positively North Korean 91.6 per cent for independence.
Brexit has finally reached its logical conclusion. Having taken back control from Brussels, the home counties can achieve their apotheosis in secession from the King of the North’s dictatorial Westminster regime.
The immediate casus belli is a proposal to accommodate up to 1,256 asylum seekers at a former defence storage and distribution centre.
Much has been made locally of the arrival of large numbers of men. MOD Bicester, however, is, of course, a military site. Parliament was told in February that 725 armed forces personnel were located across it. There seems to have been no previous uprising against the presence of hundreds of young men of “fighting age” when they were a different colour.
Then there is the infrastructure. Opponents complain that the asylum site has poor pedestrian access and that residents would have to walk more than a mile along an unlit road.
Surely some mistake? The entire revolt is based on the danger that hundreds of idle young men might descend on Piddington and menace the squire’s daughters. Now we discover that the proposed camp is so isolated, and the route into the village so inaccessible, that this is itself grounds for objection. A textbook orientalist fantasy, the asylum seekers are both dangerously close and impossibly remote.
There are, of course, serious objections to using barracks as mass asylum accommodation. When Napier Barracks and Penally Camp were used in 2020–21, official inspectors found cramped and sometimes filthy conditions, serious failures of management and safeguarding, and inadequate Home Office oversight. At Napier, they said the dormitory arrangements made a large Covid outbreak ‘virtually inevitable’.
The problem with camps is what they do to the people forced to live in them, not that their inhabitants might walk into the nearest village.
Now Piddington’s organisers are encouraging others to follow their example. The revolt of the shires may yet spread.
If it does, Westminster should take back control of its borders: passport checks at the village hall, a customs post on the B4011, a large defensive moat and perhaps a Royal Navy patrol vessel should keep the Principality of Piddington safely contained.
