English village votes to 'secede' from UK over asylum centre plan / Photo: © AFP
English village votes to 'secede' from UK over asylum centre plan
An English village of around 350 people announced Wednesday that a vast majority of residents had voted yes in an "independence referendum" staged 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 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 recognised 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."
The local parish council chair Tim McNally said that the village will now be known as the "principality of Piddington".
McNally told Sky News: "For us, it's about proportionality -- how does a small village of 350 odd people assimilate with 1,250 males?"
He accused the government of "trying to rush this whole plan through".
"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.
The council chief warned the planned centre "will be a lightning rod to the far right, who come here to protest" and "potentially attack" asylum seekers.
But Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told the BBC that a former military base "is a better option for housing asylum seekers" than hotels or rented accommodation.
"We do have to house people somewhere while we get a grip on the asylum chaos... and that base will go ahead," she said.
Around Britain, regular protests have been staged in towns and villages against the housing of asylum seekers in hotels and other facilities.
- 'I voted to leave' -
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.
"I voted to leave the United Kingdom," 76-year-old Piddington resident Herbert Owen, told AFP during the vote, saying it felt like the government did not "care" about the bucolic village in the Oxfordshire countryside.
"We have a village hall, a 12th-century church and a playing field -- and that's it," another villager Ian Darby, 63, said, questioning how the migrants would spend their time.
"It is a takeover of our village, it's four times the people of this village. They are going to want to get out and about (locally) and that raises serious issues," he said.
"I've lived here, my whole life... I won't really feel safe enough to walk around anymore," 17-year-old student and part-time stablehand Dita Jackson told AFP.
According to the government, 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 centre-left 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.
(Y.Leyard--DTZ)
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