PIDDINGTON, England — Few would suspect this sedate village north of Oxford, population 350, is on the front line of Britain’s immigration battles. But the signs marking entry into the newly-established “principality” — fresh from a headline-grabbing vote to symbolically secede from the U.K. — tell a different story. A father and son visiting from the island of Jersey posed for pictures and brandished their passports as they crossed a white picket fence.
They joked that they were immigrating here. The village’s declaration of “independence” from the rest of the U.K. came in a symbolic referendum, which took aim at the use of a military barracks on Piddington’s periphery to house up to 1,250 asylum seekers. The result was an overwhelming 285 in favor of leaving the U.K., with just 26 villagers opting to remain.
Now this very British protest threatens to spread to other shires. It has become a magnet for Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s critics — handing them fresh ammunition to use against him as they push to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. All the while, Britain’s far-right is threatening to shift attention away from the watery frontier of the English Channel toward “defending” Piddington from newcomers.
That raises the prospect of unwanted, balaclava-wearing activists descending on an otherwise tranquil village. When POLITICO headed down rural roads to reach the bucolic breakaway “state” this week, Kemi Badenoch was there by pure coincidence. The Conservative Party leader was following a line of right-wingers pledging their support for this tiny patch of Middle England in revolt.
Over plates of biscuits and mugs of tea in the small village hall that has been the nerve center of this pseudo-secessionist movement, Badenoch listens attentively to the fears of the more than 40 assembled local women. And she leans in to the darkest fears the villagers harbor. Not only is this about migration, she said, but it’s a “huge safeguarding risk” too.
She warns of a “criminal element” being housed on Piddington’s doorstep — the arrival of hundreds of men whose identities are little known, up against cherished playing fields that back onto the military base (albeit through barbed wire fencing). Badenoch also started making her party’s abstract — and divisive — vision for leaving the ECHR a little more real in the eyes of those on the frontline. It’s a stance that she knows has struggled to find purchase among more traditional conservatives, who were divided over Brexit.
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