In many English villages, eggs or vegetables are left outside homes on tables. You take half a dozen of the former, then you slip cash into a box, ordinarily a few pounds. Nobody is guarding the table, nobody is monitoring the box. At the end of the day the person selling is almost guaranteed to reconcile to the penny.
One of these villages is Piddington in Oxfordshire. It’s a beautiful, sleepy, leafy place where only 358 people live. In 2024, being filled with white boomers, the village voted Liberal Democrat – possibly because that party is led by a punchable clown who confuses people by making such an ass of himself everywhere, but more likely because the party appeals to the oblivious. Like the Liberal Democrats, the white boomer residents of Piddington are partial to the EU, where they go on holiday and money, which they have some of, and of course diversity, because it sounds nice – and they’re far away from the stabbings in London or Birmingham it tends to associate itself with.
Then in June this year the village found itself in the national news. The government declared that it would use the Bicester Garrison, a former Ministry of Defence site located a mile from it as accommodation for 1,256 male asylum seekers. After having researched the definition of a ‘male asylum seeker’, the countries they come from, how they got here and the insufficient security vetting these people are subjected to upon arrival – not to mention local trends within contact crimes – the villagers’ blood ran cold.
So they decided to resist. They mounted social media campaigns, wrote open letters, staged marches and made videos begging the government to reconsider all while shouting at their hopeless MP. On Tuesday this week, the village held a symbolic referendum. 285 of its residents voted for it to leave the United Kingdom. 26 said no. Up until a few months ago, the most action a place like this would have seen was a peeping tom; now they’re talking the language of secession, two steps from civil war.
It’s taking successive UK governments a very long time to grasp a simple point: when people come from different places with different norms, they do not relinquish those. Some of the countries here see gay chaps being tossed from rooftops – some see women stoned if those women do not do as they’re instructed to. Expecting them to change the moment they make landfall is preposterously unrealistic and irresponsible.
But the Liberal Democrats do that. They think just that. To them, everyone who dares suggest reducing the size of the state, or being more objectively selective when it comes to welfare is Idi Amin, or Vladimir Putin. Their own CEO had to plead with party activists to stop threatening to shoot feminists in the neck. This useless party, that only ever increases its popularity when someone from a legacy party is arrested for poisoning a rent boy, or blacks up for a fancy dress, believes in accommodating migrants – ‘climate refugees’. It boasts ‘anti-racism’ and diversity and supports two-tiers of everything. But it didn’t tell the residents of Piddington what these things actually mean in practice, and it didn’t prepare them for when the rubber hits the road.
Sure, you could make comparisons to what happened in Martha’s Vineyard in 2022, when Florida governor Ron de Santis sent 50 Venezuelan ‘climate refugees’ to those gilded island boomers. Then, the silver-haired maniacs performatively handed out tea and burgers before politely instructing the visitors to f*** off, then remarking to the assembled media that, for the 28 minutes the ‘climate refugees’ were there, they had ‘enriched’ the joint. But 1,256 men? In a village of 358? For ten years?
Perhaps the issue is best studied alongside one of the more awkward realities of contemporary English politics over the past three decades: parties that canvassed on a policed or reduced immigration position have enjoyed electoral success. But when in government, these same parties have reneged on manifesto promises, or – as is the case with Boris Johnson’s administration – enacted the complete opposite.
Asserting personal responsibility here is not kind. Life in English villages is a vastly different experience to the country’s cities. Indeed, detachment breeds lethargy, but the English villager is a strong national identity, one of the country’s soft power expressions beloved by visiting Americans and envied by metropolitans. Should they be expected to understand what things like diversity really mean when all they really want to do is take the dogs for a walk then drink a pint of bitter at the pub?
But avoid, like monkeypox, any temptation to feel sorry for the Liberal Democrats here – a party, very sadly, that now boasts a satellite nerve centre among quarters of the Democratic Alliance. In their quest to humiliate the conservatives as bigoted and unenlightened, they positioned themselves as eager, progressive and open-minded. Now slapped with the consequences of these things, they’re navel gazing as their own constituents are smeared as racist for not wanting the literal definition of diversity on their doorstep.
The theory of modern globalism is unrelenting on this feature, perhaps the one point it emphasises above all: you are no longer entitled to practice your roots, identities and routines without proximity to the new ways of the world.
[Image: Liberal democrats]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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