Aris Roussinos in Piddington. (UnHerd)
At a packed village hall meeting in picturesque Piddington, parish council leader Tim McNally railed against the British state. “The Government has stacked all of the odds against us,” he said: “They won’t let us see content. They made that content illegal. They won’t let us oppose them. And if they do, the stakes to try and take it are so high, they want to exhaust you, bankrupt you, so you don’t even attempt it.” The fact is, McNally added, standing in front of the Piddington Home Guard Centre sign, “We’re in a political structure which is not healthy right now. Let’s go for the political jugular because that’s really what counts. That’s the thing where pain can be felt and the embarrassment is felt.” Tiny Piddington is “the seed, it’s the soil, it’s the fertilizer” for a “Battle of Britain”, he told the audience, before asking them if they still wanted to proceed with their referendum on seceding from the United Kingdom. They did, and they cheered and clapped as they said so. If the delivery was polite and matter of fact, the rhetoric was revolutionary.
This, then, is what a parish council meeting in prosperous Oxfordshire looks like in 2026. A Westminster state that has lost its heartland of Southern England is simply living on borrowed time: and that’s exactly what I’d come to Piddington to see. It is not, now, a daring observation to remark that many of the institutions of the British state — the police, Westminster, democracy itself — have sacrificed their basic legitimacy on the inability of successive governments to visibly control migration, protect the populace from its harmful effects, or square their legal obligations on asylum with the increasingly hostile demands of their people. When even South Coast harbourmasters refuse berths to RNLI boats escorting unwanted migrants, or the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner can angrily claim that the Government has lost control of its borders, we see the mood of revolt has spread deeply into Britain’s otherwise unflappably centrist middle classes. It is now the Times, and not the avowedly Right-wing press, that forensically dissects the state’s failures on asylum, exposing its practices to public horror and ridicule. The asylum system is already politically dead in this country, just as it is in the rest of Europe. What is now at stake is how much more damage this government is willing to take to itself, to public order, and to the entire legitimacy of the political system, before it signs off power to a new regime willing to publicly recognize this fact.
With its almost parodically bucolic name, Piddington, a quiet village of 360 people, where the cooing of doves in the leafy lanes is disturbed only by the trundle of Ocado vans, has now attracted coverage from across the world for its planned independence referendum, a project set in train by the Government’s plan to house 1,250 single male asylum seekers in a disused MoD facility on its boundary. In his kitchen, on the other edge of the village, I asked McNally, the brains behind Piddington’s unlikely independence bid, whether locals would accept smaller numbers. “If you want to have a house or [HMO] in here, we’d tolerate it, we’d manage it,” he told me. “But when you’ve got 1,250, we’re going to have to assimilate into their society. And that’s not on and that’s not what we’re going to do.” In fact, subsequent reporting has alleged, the site may house up to 3,500 asylum seekers, outnumbering the villagers 10 to one.
The people of Piddington are right to say that this is an unreasonable demand to make of them. Yet the Government’s logic is, in its own way, hard to fault. The policy of housing boat migrants in hotels has proved wildly unpopular, and has led to mass protests across the country, typically in the wake of sex crimes or other atrocities. Yet the response of dispersing migrants into social housing, typically in poorer areas of the country, has precipitated rioting, as in Belfast or Middlesbrough, as well as a bad-tempered popular mobilization, as in Glasgow, that looks set to fruit into open disorder in the near future. All Whitehall has left, trapped by its legal obligations to asylum seekers, is to corral the constantly accumulating new arrivals into government-owned facilities, ideally near as few voters as possible, and hope for the best. The people of Piddington, and places like it, may not be happy, but they are at least unlikely to riot. For a Labour government in 2026, that’s about the best outcome that can be hoped for.
It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves here of the road not taken. In 2015, at a point when the refugee crisis on Europe’s borders was merely a moral panic for Middle East correspondents rather than the death-knell for the Continent’s postwar order, David Cameron proposed a reasonable and practical solution that would have offered a route to defanging the current crisis before it fully developed. Britain would take in 20,000 Syrian refugees over the course of the Parliament, carefully selecting and vetting deserving families from refugee camps in countries neighboring Syria. That way, the United Kingdom would take responsibility for a modest refugee flow it could reasonably expect to integrate, dispersing them across the country. It would focus its attention on Syrians — whose plight gave the demands to throw open Europe’s borders much of their moral force, even though they transpired to be a minority of those who actually arrived — and evade as far as possible the obvious security risks associated with what was effectively an open European border with the Islamic State. Even more importantly, Cameron’s plan, and its associated proposal of using European coast guards to turn back migrant boats in the Mediterranean, far from British shores, would have sidestepped the destabilization of domestic politics that would result from voters, to say nothing of aspiring migrants, rightly concluding that European leaders had entirely lost control of their countries’ borders.
But in the real world, the open-border activists won out, for too long, over cautious conservatism, and the results were precisely what any reasonable observer could have predicted. As the European architect of all the subsequent disorder (Turkey’s President Erdogan has still largely escaped the popular blame he deserves for overseeing the 2015 flow), Angela Merkel’s reputation has, in the decade since, sunk to its deserved level, for this and her many other sins against our Continent’s security and prosperity. The AfD, in 2015 a minor libertarian party, is yet to find its ceiling. While it is now a given that there is no longer an appetite for open borders, among all but the most marginal zealots, the full effects of the center’s experimentation with their demands have yet to reveal themselves, on either side of the Channel.
In polite and prosperous Piddington, the local reaction to the village’s proposed secession has been a media blitz. But in Dover and Portsmouth, last week saw the first stirrings of a new working-class form of direct action, blockading ports while eschewing uncontrolled violence. It is significant, for adherents of the Ulsterisation thesis of British politics, that the organizer of the coastal protests, Tommy Robinson collaborator Danny Tommo, hit upon the idea for his new Patriot Platform movement after travelling to Belfast during this summer’s riots. Returning home enthused at the concept of black-clad Loyalists working in a disciplined manner to achieve concrete goals, the new approach has taken the place of the mass flag-waving jamborees previously characterizing the English anti-immigration right. But it is also worth noting that the muscle of his new group derives from the already-existing and organically formed local “patriot” anti-immigration groups of southern and eastern England. A militant, working-class mobilization against mass immigration is now a factor in British politics, whether or not Tommo can consolidate his attempt to direct it.
But back in Piddington, villagers expressed open distaste for such forms of street action and open manifestations of anti-migrant politics, indicating divisions of class and political temperament the Government’s electoral rivals may struggle to navigate. “That would perhaps be more of a Bicester thing,” one resident told me, expressing a world of class feeling in terse English cultural shorthand. Middle-class villagers, expressing their fears, spoke in semi-veiled terms, women saying they worry about walking their dogs alone, fathers about letting their children roam free. These stronger statements against immigration itself, rather than the specific site on their doorstep, were uniformly delivered in Oxfordshire accents, though even still, elderly residents with thick burrs worried about skinheads coming down “from Birmingham” to wreak havoc.
For the anti-immigration parties competing to dominate the British Right, consolidating these different class mores into an electoral coalition will therefore prove difficult. To win the country, Reform will have to win over leafy shire heartlands like Piddington, whose voters, like Farage himself, are uncomfortable at the sight of men in black balaclavas taking to the streets. But faced with a gadfly challenger on his Right, in the shape of Rupert Lowe’s Restore, openly supportive of Tommo’s activism, Farage needs to keep an increasingly assertive and rebellious working-class street within his coalition too. The linchpin in holding the two groups together seems to be Zia Yusuf, recently deployed to both Piddington and Portsmouth to express his support for the two opposing forms of rebellion. Perhaps, indeed, Yusuf is more personally comfortable with the more kinetic forms of revolt than his boss: his rhetoric suggests that his role is to say, and do, what Farage does not himself feel comfortable publicly aligning himself with.
The Piddington independence movement is careful to maintain a public stance of political neutrality, though its adherents, perhaps stung by the schadenfreude their plight has earned from the online Right, were keen to assure me they were not Liberal Democrats. We can assume they will not be voting for Burnham either, or the Greens. The remaining realistic options are then Reform and the Conservatives, and in this Piddington represents a microcosm of the southern English middle classes: unhappy with a dysfunctional immigration system, particularly when its consequences land upon their doorstep, but also uncomfortable with open or overly assertive displays of anti-migration politics.
Rather than the once seeming-inevitability of a Reform government, the impression left by Piddington was that the growing shift against asylum dysfunction in middle-class England may instead revive the fortunes of the Conservatives, increasingly strident against the ECHR, but instinctively closer to the class mores of the centrist political establishment. Reform may have won over the younger online Right, but it may struggle to persuade their true-blue parents. Rather than fomenting anti-immigration feeling, as its opponents imagine, Reform’s success has been in riding a wave of organic dissatisfaction that has, as shown in Portsmouth and Dover, often outpaced Farage’s personal appetite for rebellion.
If Burnham has shown a realistic understanding of class politics in shifting the consequences of asylum dysfunction onto middle-class rural constituencies which will never vote for him, to win back working-class constituencies which still plausibly might, the opening this leaves for the broader British Right in winning over the shires presents more of a challenge than an opportunity for Reform. Piddington offers a glimpse of a country exhausted by Britain’s dysfunctional asylum system, but also of a Right divided on how far it is willing to go to overturn it, a division more expressive of political temperaments, or class tensions, than of desired political ends.
Reform’s analysis of the solutions required, demanding a cultural revolution within the British state as a whole, is deeper and broader than that of the Conservatives, content merely to leave the ECHR they, rightly or not, see as the root of the problem. But Reform has to win over the suspicious middle classes as well as maintaining its shaky hold on the working class; whereas all the Tories are required to do is present a harder edge on immigration while maintaining a public commitment to law-and-order conservatism — a stance made easier for them by Restore forcing Farage to more activist positions than he feels comfortable with, and which are unpopular in the shires. After all, a Cameron government, left in power, might have mitigated the problem before we ever reached this stage of political fragmentation and disorder, in what is surely the least discussed “what might have been” of modern British politics. On paper, the growing mood of middle-class revolt should be a comfort for Reform: in practice, it is likely to be the Conservatives who will use it to win back Middle England. If Burnham is gambling that no single challenger can win both Piddington and Portsmouth, he may yet prove entirely correct.
