English village votes to 'secede' from UK over asylum centre / Photo: © AFP
English village votes to 'secede' from UK over asylum centre
An English village of around 350 people announced Wednesday that a vast majority of residents had voted yes in an "independence referendum" to protest plans to house over 1,200 migrants in a nearby facility.
Piddington in central England, 25 kilometres (15 miles) from the university city of Oxford, has grabbed headlines with its tongue-in-cheek breakaway vote.
The village's parish council announced Wednesday that with 312 ballots counted, 285 had voted to secede from Britain over plans to house asylum seekers in a nearby disused military site, in a symbolic vote with no real legal basis.
Residents were handed a ballot paper with the statement: "I support Piddington seeking to secede from the United Kingdom and pursuing self-determination."
"I think what this result shows is that Piddington campaigners have done an incredible job to highlight their concerns about the proposed asylum centre," the leader of Oxfordshire county council, Tim Bearder, told the BBC.
He accused the government of proposing the plan "without engaging with local people".
But Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told Sky News she would "gently say to the people of Piddington that we inherited a massive asylum backlog" and it is unacceptable for the whole burden to "fall on poorer communities".
Around Britain, regular protests have been staged in towns and villages against the housing of asylum seekers in hotels and other facilities.
The Piddington referendum was a play on the British comedy film "Passport to Pimlico".
In the 1949 classic, a small group of Londoners discover treasure and declare independence making them exempt from post-war rationing and other bureaucratic restrictions.
"What we're doing is a very British thing -- we're voting," the local parish council chair Tim McNally said ahead of the result.
"Because this is a really important topic... not just in this region, (but) across the whole of the United Kingdom. We're just ground zero," he said.
According to government information, the proposed centre would be used for a minimum of 10 years to house single adult male asylum seekers.
The "safety and security" of the migrants, staff at the base and the local community would be "of the utmost importance", it said.
The Labour Party, in power since July 2024, is phasing out the use of hotels as migrant accommodation, a policy it inherited from the previous Conservative government.
It has vowed to completely end their use by the end of this parliament, due in 2029, turning instead to ex-military bases.
(M.Travkina--DTZ)
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