Piddington’s treason

Meet the Oxfordshire villagers rebelling against Britain’s asylum policy

Two signs mark the entrance to Piddington, east Oxfordshire. “I AM SPARTACUS. YOU ARE SPARTACUS. WE ARE SPARTACUS,” reads one in blue and yellow letters. The other leans on a fence, bearing the words: “The Village That Roars.”

Tim McNally, Piddington’s energetic parish council chair, came up with that one. It’s a tribute to the 1959 British comedy The Mouse That Roared. Peter Sellers plays the prime minister of Grand Fenwick, a tiny European Duchy that declares war on the US and accidentally wins. Piddington is a tiny village with around 350 residents, and in its small, pastel-pink village hall on 15 September, the parish voted on whether it wants to leave the UK.

Piddington’s independence bid began earlier this summer, after residents discovered the government planned to house 1,250 male asylum seekers in a former Ministry of Defence site nearby. A crisis parish council meeting followed. McNally tried to present a plan, but people were “numb”. The next day, he was driving on the M4 when he saw a banner on a bridge that read “Jeremy Clarkson for King”. McNally started thinking about what kind of personality-driven stunt would make a big splash. For the next three nights he didn’t sleep.

Eventually McNally decided on a referendum to leave the UK. On 3 July, he pitched the idea to residents, and they weren’t sure. Piddington has a lot of retirees, he noted when we spoke earlier this month. They thought politics was still done by writing letters to MPs. But McNally wanted Piddington to become “the biggest little place on this Earth”. He joked that residents would know they had succeeded when Elon Musk weighed in or Donald Trump landed his helicopter on the parish grass.

Musk acknowledged Piddington on X in July. McNally told me that senior figures close to Trump have made the president aware of Piddington’s plight. He hopes one day his chopper might come. Reform’s Zia Yusuf and Suella Braverman have shown up in Piddington recently. “They’ve got a very rich political agenda,” McNally said. “I fully respect that. But we have our own too.” When the politicians arrived, they wanted the cameras to start rolling immediately. McNally insisted they talk about the village’s problem first, “and Zia, credit due to him, he listened”.

Andy Burnham, meanwhile, has mostly avoided the topic, saying he will “look into” the issue. That doesn’t faze McNally. If the vote went as expected, Piddington would be out of the UK anyway, he said, smiling. “From Wednesday I’m going to be engaging with Ed Miliband.” McNally has been relentless, writing thousands of emails and doing countless TV interviews. A TalkTV presenter delighted him by pointing out that the vote is on the anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Other parish councils have emailed to ask for advice on how to stage a referendum. “It’s going to be a problem,” he said happily. “It’s going to be an embarrassment.” None of this is technically legal, of course. Worse, in fact, “it could be treasonous in the true sense of the word” McNally noted. “But because I’ve got these politicians now around me, that sort of ensures that I don’t get caught up in the law. Well if I do, then they’ll hopefully be looking after me.”

Piddington is represented by Liberal Democrat Calum Miller MP, who has opposed the new asylum accommodation but previously expressed “compassion” for asylum seekers. This has led to online militants accusing Piddington locals of being middle-class, liberal “Nimbys”, happy to back lax border policies until the asylum seekers show up in their area. McNally rejected this characterisation, telling me he knows residents who support a range of political parties. He said that Piddington’s residents are not born into wealth. “We’ve had to work damn hard,” he said. “It’s a quality of life we’ve bought into, and we want to protect. So, where are the rights for us as the indigenous people?”

Places like Piddington don’t traditionally have its residents talking about their “indigenous” population. It’s the sort of village where, as AJP Taylor once put it, you could “hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”. (McNally said eight policemen cover Piddington and 45 surrounding villages.) This is not like the areas of Britain that have previously broken out into rioting over issues with asylum seekers: Glasgow, Belfast, Epping. Piddington contains four streets, one church and a pub that closed down years ago. I walked past hay bales and chickens and a leaflet announcing an errant tortoise had been found and detained. Now Britain’s state failure is on its doorstep.

Earlier in the week, Piddington natives were ferrying their children home from school or gossiping at bends in the road. John is a retired builder whose son lives just over the street. He was smoking a cigar on his doorstep, watching the gold clouds and worrying about what an influx of strange men would do to a small area. “I think it’s dreadful,” he said. “They’re going to overwhelm us.” Jake, a 20-year-old builder, had already seen the government begin work on the site. “It’s pretty upsetting.” I asked if he liked living in Piddington. “It’s alright,” he said. “Well. For now.”

Retired couple Ian and Hilary were strimming and pruning the rose bushes outside their house. They’ve lived in the parish for 40 years. This proposed accommodation is “really not on”, Ian told me. “That’s why we’re all up against it.” They’ve met some neighbours for the first time. “There’s an awful lot of professional people living in the village who we didn’t know until very recently,” Ian said. “They’ve all come forward and they’re all doing their bit.” Another resident, Ian Darby, is one of those radicalised commuters. His two chocolate Sprocker Spaniels, Jojo and Poppy, fussed over him while he told me about how the ECHR restricts Britain’s asylum policies. When I asked about his general outlook, Darby told me he has “rotated around middle England-type politics”. He was alarmed when Danny Tommo, an anti-immigration activist who organised recent demonstrations in Portsmouth, threatened to visit Piddington. “That would not be good news for the village.” Darby hopes a public inquiry will squash the issue. Obvious issues would crop up, he told me. There doesn’t seem to be a plan for managing the new flow of sewage, or the added electricity use. And there’s the risk that construction might pose to the area’s four rare species of bat.

The asylum accommodation will be built behind Jubilee nature reserve, a field off what seems to be Piddington’s main road. The area is fenced off by several rows of barbed wire. The overlooking field, meanwhile, is in regular use and, that evening, three children were kicking a football in the fading light. Their father is Jamie Perkin, a 37-year-old construction worker who has lived in the area for three years. His wife, an interior architect, grew up in Piddington. Perkin isn’t one of the village Lib Dems. “I’ll openly tell you, I have right-wing beliefs,” he said. “Probably more than ever, for obvious reasons.” He voted Reform in the last election, as did some of his friends in the village. Perkin said the asylum plans have harmed residents’ mental health. He worries about his children, but he doesn’t want to leave the parish. Eight years ago, their baby died, and they buried her in Piddington. The other children like visiting her grave. “If we [left], then I suppose we’re abandoning her.”

In July, Piddington campaigners held a picnic on the green. Children were allowed to paint on a set of big white letters spelling out “PIDDINGTON”. The messages are mixed. “Come in! We love all peaple,” Harry, aged four, has written, next to smudged hearts and smiley faces. Another child did a big splodge of blue, with two words: “Keep going.” Whether the message was addressing the refugees or the grown-ups campaigning to send them away wasn’t clear.

[Further reading: Prince George starts at Eton and enters the belly of the beast]