Piddington is apparently very proud of itself. It has voted to leave the UK, because it so detests the idea of living next to asylum seekers. “We are Piddington, the village that roars,” vice-chair of the parish council Susannah Parden said, seemingly unaware of how preposterous she sounded.
The village has worked itself up into such a state of hysteria over a nearby barracks being converted into asylum seeker accommodation that it has voted to Brexit itself. It’s symbolic of course – basically a PR stunt – but we should take them at their word.
If they want out, let’s respect their wishes. Let’s Article 50 this thing – trigger some imaginary legal mechanism, put up trade and regulatory barriers around the village and enforce strict visa requirements. The newly established nation of Piddington will be landlocked, of course, and surrounded on all sides by the United Kingdom, so we can basically do what we want with it.
I suggest we take this opportunity for a nation-building exercise. We will colonise Piddington and then civilise its inhabitants until they achieve the kind of maturity required to govern themselves. This will entail a ban on social media websites, right-wing newspapers, conservative TV networks and Reform politicians.
Much of the media has presented the Piddington story as twee and genteel – the Wind in the Willows of anti-asylum protests. But in fact much of what has been said by those in this campaign reflects far-right narratives or adopts their language in its entirety. There’s nothing twee about it.
One hundred and thirty-three female residents wrote an open letter to female MPs saying that their “safety, security and freedoms will be under threat”. The unspoken assumption is that all male asylum seekers are rapists, or are at least more likely to commit sexual assault than an average member of the public. “It’s a lot of unvetted people as well,” one female resident said. “Not knowing who they are, where they’re from. Ultimately they will have cultural differences to us.”
One 72-year-old man in the village spoke to reporters while putting up bunting. Lovely little detail. All very jolly. But the words which came out his mouth were pure GB News. “I voted for us to leave because the government aren’t listening to us,” he said. “The idea of planting all those single, fighting-age young men on the edge of a village that’s quiet and peaceful…” It’s the “fighting age” line that gives it away. This is reliably how male asylum seekers are described on far-right social media posts and by populist politicians.
Piddington is presented as a picture-perfect idyllic village lost in the glories of time, like a butter advert, or a murder mystery broadcast on weekday afternoons. In fact, it is right next to HMP Bullingdon – a prison and young offenders institute – as well as multiple army bases. Presumably the villagers are well enough acquainted with “men of fighting age”. But evidently those sorts of men aren’t considered a threat, because they’re mostly white.
If that sounds crude, it’s because the politics of this are very crude and we should be clearer about what these people are really saying.
It is essential to the anti-refugee right that asylum seekers are never presented as desperate people in need of help, but instead as an invasion force. That is where the language of fighting-age men and sexual violence comes from. We barely even notice it anymore, but our entire narrative around asylum has shifted into an invasion storyline, which even a few years ago was only heard in the wilder territories of the far-right.
This has two effects. It creates the sense of an emergency which must be stopped for reasons of public safety. And, just as important, it removes the potential for compassion from our mind. It makes even thinking that we might help asylum seekers nearly unthinkable, as absurd and illogical as trying to help Nazis during the Second World War.
It is by controlling this narrative structure that the populist right has dictated out national debate on this issue. The statements from the good people of Piddington demonstrate how effective this has been. They have eaten it up – hook, line and sinker. And now they think in the way the populist right wants them to.
Serious-minded conservative newspapers and politicians would once have ignored this sort of attention-seeking stunt. Not anymore. Now Piddington is prime fodder for the populist right ecosystem. The Times covers them in gushing terms. The Telegraph worships them.
Then come the MPs – Suella Braverman for Reform, Chris Philp for the Tories – all very serious, all very sympathetic, listening intently to people’s “legitimate concerns”. And their presence leads to another wave of coverage, all of it spreading like wildfire on X and Facebook – targeting an older demographic.
The same media conveyor belt which radicalised the people of that village, now turns them into content, in turn, to influence others.
And then, of course, the final act of cowardice takes place, a crucial moment in the whole tawdry drama, in which the UK’s progressive politicians pretend to believe all this nonsense. “Had Piddington really roared?”, culture secretary Lisa Nandy was asked this morning on BBC Breakfast. “I think they have,” she answered. “We have heard it. We are listening.”
It is this last comment which gives events like these political meaning. Nandy knows this is all mortifying gibberish. She is a decent human being. She cares about asylum seekers. Probably some part of her wants to mention the role of compassion and kindness in human relations. Perhaps, in some distant part of her mind, she wishes to call for a better, more civilised version of Britain than the one we see laid out before us here. But she dares not.
So instead she does what Labour ministers did under Starmer and will now evidently do under Burnham, and pretends that all this ignorant zombified racist Facebook tosh is, in fact, reasonable and valid.
If only our problems could be solved by ushering this village out of the UK and putting it into some kind of international quarantine zone. But unfortunately, they can’t, because there is nothing special about Piddington. It is consuming the same poisoned media diet as the rest of the country and parroting the same toxic lies.
It can be stopped of course. But that means we have to challenge it, rather than pay lip-service to it.
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