Andy Burnham and his Home Office cohorts would be very much happier if this lot were all in black hoodies and balaclavas, like the new breed of anti-migrant protester we have seen in recent days in Dover and Portsmouth (and, indeed, outside the offices of the Daily Mail).
How much easier it would be to demonise them as either the dark forces of the Far Right or a bunch of nutters – or both.
Instead, infuriatingly, these people are in jumpers, gilets, jackets and jeans. In short – though not in shorts – they are in country casual.Â
Quite a lot of them are farmers. Others are accountants, engineers, builders, housewives and public servants. Many, if not most, are women. And I cannot see a single face-covering between them.
Nor can the spin doctors paint them as knuckle-dragging Reform/Restore voters since, at the last elections, they returned a Lib Dem and a full hat-trick of Lib Dem local councillors (though they may not go down that route again in future). No one here has been attaching British and English flags to the handful of local lampposts.
These are the people of Piddington, the pretty Oxfordshire village of 358 souls which is about to vote on leaving the United Kingdom, having been told that it will shortly accommodate more than 1,250 asylum seekers.Â
All young, single, undocumented males, they will be free to come and go from their digs in a former Ministry of Defence (MoD) site on the edge of the village.
With no shops or cafes in Piddington and nothing to do all day, some may board the first available bus to nearby Bicester – on the rare occasions when one actually turns up. But what about the rest of them the rest of the time?Â
A group of women from Piddington have issued an open letter to every female MP sharing their concerns over plans to accommodate more than 1,250 asylum seekers in the village
Daily Mail reporter Robert Hardman at Piddington in Oxfordshire, where a former Ministry of Defence (MoD) site was revealed as a planned asylum-seeker camp earlier this year
These are some of the many questions flying around the room this week as I drop in on a gathering which feels more like the Boston Tea Party than your ordinary parish council meeting.
For I find the village making its final plans ahead of Tuesday’s historic vote on a simple yes/no issue: Should Piddington secede from the United Kingdom and become a principality – like Monaco or Liechtenstein?Â
The result will be announced, by-election style, on Wednesday morning. And I am more than happy to wager my house on the result.
Before this week’s gathering closes and people adjourn to the bar, I ask parish council chairman Tim McNally to read out the question on the ballot paper – ‘Yes or No: I support Piddington seeking to secede from the United Kingdom and pursuing self-determination’.Â
I then ask those packed into the village hall (most of the electorate) to raise their hands if they intend to vote ‘Yes’. The result is a thumping Vladimir Putin/North Korea-style nem con slam dunk: 100 per cent in favour.
Nonetheless, the referendum will be held formally and correctly, under strict electoral protocols with numbered voting papers and a secret ballot. It will not be legally binding, since the Government has not authorised the vote.
One local council official has actually warned the villagers that it is illegal. So much for all that chips ‘n gravy baloney about localism and devolution from ‘King of the North’ Andy Burnham. Here in rural Oxfordshire they want their own Prince of Piddington.
It is now two months since the Daily Mail first dropped in on this saga. Back then, I likened it, half-jokingly, to the plot of the old 1949 Ealing comedy, Passport To Pimlico – in which the residents of a small London district discover an ancient treaty which means they are still part of Burgundy and, thus, not British and not subject to post-war rations and taxes.
The Home Office announced plans to house more than one thousand asylum seekers on the edge of the village
Our Piddington story captured the imagination of the national and international media, not least because it has all the essential ingredients – picture postcard village with funny name/medieval church/rolling acres/history/colourful cross-section of articulate locals. It could easily host an episode of Midsomer Murders, a series filmed just down the road.
Yet behind the good humour and the sensible jerseys, these locals are every bit as serious and angry as those Poundland paramilitaries in their balaclavas down on the South Coast.
Back in July, neither the local MP for Bicester and Woodstock, Lib Dem Calum Miller, nor Cherwell District Council, run by the Lib Dems with Green support, wanted to talk to me about this local uprising.Â
They had voiced the mandatory dismay at the lack of consultation from the Home Office, having been told out of the blue that the old MoD depot on the edge of Piddington was scheduled to become an open-door migrant centre.
However, not wanting to look in any way xenophobic, the MP then signed a letter in support of the asylum seekers while the council steered all questions to the Home Office which, in turn, said it was committed to moving small boat arrivals out of hotels.
The official response, in other words, was to write off the story as a sweet little silly season spasm of local anger and let it all blow over in a week or two.
Except, the Piddington story has not gone away. The world’s media has followed the Daily Mail down here. TV networks from America to Australia have latched on to the story. Even the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has pitched in to voice support.
Here is a Government spin doctor’s nightmare: A grass-roots movement which resolutely refuses to fall into a stereotypical subset ripe for demonisation as either ‘Far Right’ or ‘Nimby’.
Robert Hardman attended a meeting hosted by Piddington locals, who are opposed to a migrant camp being set up next to their village
In light of the plans, Piddington voted to hold a symbolic referendum on leaving the UKÂ
You need only look at this week’s video message from the female half of the village which has already clocked up more than two million hits without even trying. It is accompanied by a letter to every female MP asking for solidarity in the face of an influx of single foreign young men with nothing to do except hang around a village.
As the 133-strong ‘Women of Piddington’ state in their appeal to the parliamentary sisterhood: ‘They would outnumber us ten to one. As fellow women, you will understand the serious risks.’
In fact, they could be outnumbered 26 to one if the Home Office opts to install 3,500 asylum seekers here, as an earlier blueprint suggested, although officials have now denied that this is the plan.Â
The ‘Women of Piddington’ are not stopping there, of course. When Samantha Phillips stands up at this week’s meeting to offer a course in female self-defence, all 26 places are swiftly snapped up.
It is just another example of how this village has found a very effective alternative to blokes in balaclavas. Piddington is now on the map with a smile rather than a scowl. It also seems to have an uncanny knack for publicity.
It was back in July that the chairman of the parish council, management consultant Tim McNally, deliberately chose July 4 for a vote on whether to stage a referendum at all. ‘The USA was celebrating 250 years of independence on the same day and we thought we’d model ourselves on them,’ he told me at the time.
A polling booth was set up at the village hall for the day – all of it monitored on CCTV – and the result was an overwhelming vote in favour of holding an independence referendum (plus one invitation to a barn dance).
The campaigners then fixed a date for that plebiscite. Next Tuesday, September 15, seemed perfect. It comes ahead of Thursday’s deadline for contributions to the ‘public consultation’ on the quadrupling of the local population.Â
The tiny Oxfordshire village has a population of just 350
Everyone accepts that this process is merely a box-ticking exercise which the Government must always undertake before pressing ahead with whatever it has decided to do in the first place.
Piddington therefore picked Tuesday so that the vote can be announced before the deadline.
‘I was on TV explaining that we would be holding our vote on September 15,’ recalls Mr McNally. ‘Then the presenter said, ‘So you have chosen Battle of Britain Day’. It was only then that I realised that we really had. So we are now calling ourselves ‘Ground Zero for the Battle of Britain’.’
September 15 is, indeed, the official anniversary of the 114-day battle in 1940. The Home Office spin doctors will be displeased to hear that a supporter has offered to fly a Spitfire over Piddington next week. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It will depend on the weather,’ adds Mr McNally.
This is a slick operation in every regard. This week’s meeting includes media training. Villagers are told to expect saturation press attention and ‘to speak from the heart’ about what they want for the principality of Piddington. ‘Tax-free shopping!’ shouts one old chap at the back to gales of laughter.
Mr McNally is recruiting local children to design a new flag for an independent Piddington. This is a canny electorate. Many are boffins from the world of Formula One, given the concentration of motor racing teams in and around Oxfordshire.
Engineer James Burton has designed a very professional new Tiktok video to go with the new Piddington song – ‘It’s the Battle for Britain’ – complete with computer-generated wartime scenes and a dazzling heroine in Forties chic.
‘Everyone in this hall is of a certain age, let’s face it,’ he says. ‘We want to reach 16-24-year-olds all over the country.’
Pictured: A security guard is pictured at the entrance of the proposed migrant camp Â
The village is scouring the Whitehall rulebook to use it against Whitehall, not least draconian bat protection legislation.Â
Farmer Joy Haw-Cook, 56, has been put in charge of the bat survey and stands up to report on her findings with a local bat expert in to help. ‘One of them is incredibly rare and is on the Red List as ‘one of the rarest and most elusive mammals in the UK’. So that is really great news for us!’ She receives a hefty round of applause.
‘Call me Batwoman or ‘Old Bat’,’ she jokes. ‘I didn’t know much about bats before but I do now and you can’t disturb very rare bats until the breeding season is over. A judge could put an injunction on the site until May.’
‘People just feel the Government is not listening,’ says accountant and deputy chair of the parish council, Susannah Parden, who has been appointed returning officer for the referendum.
‘We are giving all our freedoms to people who have simply broken into the country and we feel unsafe,’ says Krissy Honour, a farmer with a 13-year-old daughter. ‘She’s got her own flock of sheep on our smallholding right next to the MoD. I won’t be letting her out to look after them if we have no idea who these men are.’
Communities in the same boat from across Britain have been in touch with the Piddington team to discuss tactics.
The campaigners here are also feeding their research and ideas into a broader protest group drawn from across the Bicester area. Called ‘Wrong Plan. Wrong Site’, it is seeking a judicial review of the Home Office’s decision.
More legalistic in tone, this has the support of the local MP.Â
‘Residents across our community have worked to expose the serious flaws in the proposal to build an asylum centre at MoD Bicester,’ says Calum Miller in a written statement.Â
‘My goal has been to unite the various local groups around a community-based, inclusive campaign so that our area speaks with one voice to Government in expressing our opposition. I have challenged the Prime Minister to live up to his pledge to give agency and control back to local areas.’
He declines to say how he would vote in the referendum, if he lived in Piddington.
I get no response from Cherwell Council, although Mr McNally says he received a ‘curious’ call from them. ‘We got a missed call and rang it straight back and it was the council’s electoral services department. They said they hadn’t called but then said that the referendum was against the law. We are only allowed to hold a vote on things like what colour to paint the church gates.’
Ultimately, last week’s scenes on the coast and next week’s vote in Piddington all underline the same point: No one in Britain is buying the old liberal narrative that the (ever-expanding) small boats are packed with doctors, engineers and families fleeing war and oppression. Nor do people believe that they are ‘frontline’ workers without whom the NHS will implode.
It is accepted that these are, simply, people – many from peaceful Commonwealth countries – with an unimpeachable aspiration to make a better life for themselves and also the wherewithal to pay a people smuggler £3,000 for a ride on a boat.
Once they land, they can pretend to be whatever and whoever they like and, according to a Home Office whistleblower, they will be believed. As The Times revealed this week, the number of those granted asylum who are actually in genuine need of asylum stands at just 1 per cent.
None of which is the primary concern of the ‘Women of Piddington’ whom I meet.
 What concerns them most is the fact that their future neighbours have such a limited grasp of British culture and norms that the Government now feels the need to issue them with leaflets informing them that rape is illegal.
That is why, come Wednesday morning’s referendum result, Piddington will be casting around for a prince.
