Britain’s left-wing government is cleaving to its “point of principle” that migrants should be resettled in middle class and rural areas, and has used emergency powers to approve the conversion of a military base in Oxfordshire into a migrant camp.
Labour’s Communities Secretary Angela Rayner has given the go-ahead to convert former British Army garrison Ordnance Depot Bicester into a migrant camp for 1,256 arrivals despite years of protests by locals in the next-door village of Piddington, who say they fear for their safety and have even threatened to secede from Britain over the plan. Nigel Farage has slammed the move, stating the government is “determined to flood towns and villages across the country with fighting-age male illegal migrants.”
Rayner used emergency powers to bypass local opposition to approve the change of use for the government-owned facility, reports The Daily Telegraph. The move is part of the government’s clearly expressed policy of ending the norm hitherto of dispersing migrants through the country in properties chosen according to value for money for taxpayers.
Inevitably, this had meant choosing the cheapest housing possible, typically placing migrants in depressed working-class communities.
As previously reported, Britain’s new Labour government is determined to spread the benefits of mass migration more fairly, with it saying of the Prime Minister Andy Burnham: “Andy feels that the current system is unfair, and as a point of principle, he wants to see a redress of the distribution… it needs to be fairer in the meantime. He acknowledges that it would cost more money to do it more fairly, but that is what we need to do.
Burnham’s immigration minister Anna Turley added in August: “it’s important that everyone plays their fair share”. This theme continued today, with a government spokesman saying of its decision to push ahead with the migrant camp over the strong opposition from the Piddington villagers: “The government is working on a fairer distribution of asylum accommodation across the country, with over £1 billion saved in costs since the election.
“This includes closing all asylum hotels and moving to alternative accommodation, including former military sites. These are designed to be self-contained, with 24/7 security and CCTV, to minimise the impact on the local community.”
CCTV or not, under the camp plans the boat migrant inmates are not to be confined to barracks but allowed to come and go as they please, something which has caused a great deal of ill feeling locally. Parish council boss Tim McNally — who previously called a plebiscite in the village which voted to secede the United Kingdom and even appeal to America to become the 51st state if the plan goes ahead — said the village of Piddington will be lodging a legal action against the decision on Friday morning.
The Piddington area is represented politically by the Liberal Democrats, a globalist-centrist party who are in favour of mass migration and support “refugees welcome” politics, but who nevertheless objected to the plans anyway, leading to some accusations of hypocrisy. The local MP said he was disappointed with the decision and accused the government of ‘blundering’.
Regardless, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has been the party campaigning most assiduously on the question of migrant camps and Mr Farage said in response to the government pushing ahead with the Bicester redevelopment: “Andy Burnham is determined to flood towns and villages across the country with fighting-age male illegal migrants. Burnham and his government are putting women and girls at risk.”
His deputy Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesman, was in Piddington this morning and added: “Over 1,200 unvetted illegal migrant men are being dumped in Piddington. They will outnumber the women of Piddington by eight to one. Tory and Labour governments have betrayed their own people. Reform will detain and deport all of these men.”
Yusuf also clashed with Conservative Party on the ground, whose representative Chris Philp also headed to the village today. The fact there are so many illegal and irregular migrants at large in Britain in the first place is down to both Conservative and Labour governments, Yusuf said, as he took the Tory representative to task for trying to make political hay out of a situation his party helped create.
The confrontation led to a somewhat bizarre interaction which saw Conservative man Philp repeatedly telling Yusuf to stop speaking.
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