Village votes to ‘secede’ from UK over migrant plans

An English village of about 350 people yesterday announced that a vast majority of residents had voted yes in an “independence referendum” to protest plans to house more than 1,200 migrants in a nearby facility.

Piddington in central England, 25km from the university city of Oxford, has grabbed headlines with its tongue-in-cheek breakaway vote.

The village’s parish council said 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 real legal basis.

A sign is pictured in Piddington, England, on Tuesday.

Photo: AFP

Residents were handed a ballot paper with the statement: “I support Piddington seeking to secede from the United Kingdom and pursuing self-determination.”

“I think what this result shows is that Piddington campaigners have done an incredible job to highlight their concerns about the proposed asylum center,” the leader of Oxfordshire county council, Tim Bearder, told the BBC.

Bearder accused the British government of proposing the plan “without engaging with local people.”

British Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Lisa Nandy told Sky News she would “gently say to the people of Piddington that we inherited a massive asylum backlog” and it is unacceptable for the whole burden to “fall on poorer communities.”

Across Britain, regular protests have been staged in towns and villages against the housing of asylum seekers in hotels and other facilities.

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-World War II rationing and other bureaucratic restrictions.

“What we’re doing is a very British thing — we’re voting,” the local parish council chair, Tim McNally, said ahead of the result. “Because this is a really important topic ... across the whole of the United Kingdom. We’re just ground zero.”