Initially, the first two men had seemed happy to talk, but soon it was obvious they were happier to berate. Then a third man took things to a Trumpian level. Something is stirring in the mindset of Middle England, and immigration debates seem to have influenced it.
I met the three men in the Oxfordshire village of Piddington, whose byways I wandered last week. The village found itself the focus of global media attention after a tongue-in-cheek vote to “secede” from Britain, in opposition to a proposed asylum seeker centre.
It was the day after the “referendum” result and most of the global media pack had already moved on to other stories. But deeper truths are sometimes revealed after dust settles and attention shifts, so I showed up in Piddington a day late, bumping into a handful of journalistic stragglers from Japan, Norway and British paper The Guardian.
The villagers had grown wary of outside media invaders, so us stragglers joined forces to find the most interesting voices. I tagged along as The Guardian met Joe Marshall, a young Piddington parish councillor who seemed remarkably calm about the rumoured arrival that day of hard-right, anti-migrant agitators with an offer for the village of “protection”.
[ The affluent English village that declared independence to stop an asylum centreOpens in new window ]
Later, the others followed me to the door of Rachel, a New Zealand-born Piddington resident whose public criticisms of the perceived anti-foreigner tone of the campaign against the asylum centre had exposed her to a ferocious backlash, locally and online.
Rachel was drained and teary as she told us she had been on the receiving end of vituperative criticism. She had made a report to police and was concerned that some of her neighbours, in whom she was clearly losing faith, might show hard-right elements where she lived. She said her feelings towards Piddington, her home of 20 years, had changed. Rachel was beginning to feel she didn’t really know her neighbours at all.
We left Rachel’s house and walked towards the village hall, where a couple of days earlier locals had voted overwhelmingly to establish the Principality of Piddington over the UK government’s plans to build the asylum centre on a nearby disused military site. “Independence” was declared at the village hall the next morning. Now, caterers inside were unwrapping sandwiches and cake for the afters of a local funeral.
We met the three men outside. The first man, tall and imposing and wearing a brown tweed sports jacket, was friendly at first. His mood darkened when he realised one of his inquisitors was from The Guardian, the daily bible of Britain’s liberal left.
“No matter what I say, you will twist it to make me sound racist,” he said, his face contorting into a snarl. “They’re only coming here because you want them – it’s all your fault.” I assumed “they” were the 1,250 asylum seekers pencilled in for the military site.
He wasn’t a Piddington resident, but from a neighbouring village. The man seemed affluent and well educated. He was also pickling in anger over migration.
He was concerned the asylum seekers would end up wandering down the main streets of the local villages because they would have nothing else to do.
Didn’t we know anything about history, he implored.
“Don’t you know what happens to women in Muslim countries? It’s all right for you – you want them all to come here but they won’t be coming down your local streets,” said the man, jabbing his finger in the face of the Guardian journalist. She retorted that she lived in London and saw asylum seekers and other types of migrants all day, every day.
The man got angrier and angrier, while his quieter companion occasionally interjected with a supportive “yeah” each time the tweed aficionado landed an insult.
The third man walked over to raise the stakes. He was even more verbally aggressive and shouted that every journalist took “50 bags of silver” to tell “lies” all day. He was beginning to square up to us. The temperature of the conversation was rising too fast, so I tried to engage him in conversation just to calm him down.
As fast as it had risen, his temper receded when he realised somebody was interested in what he had to say.
After he stopped shouting, the man was actually quite articulate. He revealed he was attached to a fiscal policy think tank at a well-known British university. He felt migration was swamping Britain and he wanted to get into politics.
He said he had previously run in a few ill-fated campaigns for one of the other centre-right parties. But for the next election, he hoped to be a candidate for Restore Britain, a populist right-wing, anti-migrant party led by former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe. Restore has a harder edge than Reform. I think of both together as Britain’s Maga movement.
He said local residents in places such as Piddington were just “ordinary humans” who didn’t want their lives upended by excessive immigration. He also conceded that migrants, whether they were asylum seekers or ordinary working immigrants, had humanity too.
He apologised for his earlier behaviour: “You’re all just trying to do your best, and so are the migrants. But so are we. We just want to be listened to.”
The faces governing Britain recently changed. The challenges they must meet did not.
