By Kenneth Maxwell
Piddington is a small village and civil parish in Oxfordshire. Its population is 358. The British government proposed to house 1,250 male asylum seekers at a disused Ministry of Defence base nearby.
The village voted yesterday (15 September 2026) in a referendum, with 89% participation, to leave the United Kingdom. The vote was 285 to leave and 26 to stay, with one spoiled ballot. Subsequently, the “Principality of Piddington” was established.
The returning officer, Susannah Parden, vice-chair of the Piddington Parish Council, declared: “The village has roared.” As indeed it had. National and international media attention was instantaneous, and the locals proved savvy about exploiting it.
The “village roaring” was a reference to the film starring Peter Sellers, The Mouse That Roared (1959), in which he memorably played the Duchess Gloriana XII, Count Rupert Mountjoy, and Tully Bascombe, the story of the minuscule duchy of Grand Fenwick, bankrupted when an American company produces a cheap imitation of Fenwick’s sole export, its Pinot Grand Fenwick wine.
But an equally pertinent film is the 1949 Ealing Studios comedy Passport to Pimlico, starring Stanley Holloway as Arthur Pemberton, the wonderful Margaret Rutherford as Professor Hatton-Jones, and the inimitable Michael Hordern as a Metropolitan policeman, among other fine actors.
Passport to Pimlico told of the discovery of treasure and documents at a WWII bomb site declaring that a small part of Pimlico in London was legally part of Burgundy, and therefore exempt from post-war rationing and bureaucratic restrictions. In effect, it told the story of a small group of British people standing up against the status quo.
Last weekend, balaclava-clad men in Dover and Portsmouth protested against the waves of small boats crossing the English Channel bringing hundreds of illegal migrants, mainly young men, into the United Kingdom. The National Audit Office has estimated that the asylum system has cost £15 billion over the past ten years, with hotels housing “asylum seekers”, run by the private companies Serco, Clearsprings, and Mears accounting for £4 billion of that total.
September has been the peak month for illegal Channel crossings by small boat over the past ten years. The illegal migrants come predominantly from Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Eritrea, Sudan, and Turkey, and are mainly young men between the ages of 18 and 40.
Tim McNally, chairman of the Piddington Parish Council, said: “Yesterday was the anniversary of the Battle of Britain, and for us it was the battle for Britain.” A 133-member group of women in the village said that “our safety and security, and our freedom, are under threat.” They are right to be worried about the housing of 1,250 migrant men next to a village of 358. There have been horrendous cases of rape, murder, and sexual assault by illegal migrants on women and girls near migrant hotels. The British government has even issued a pamphlet to illegal migrants explaining that in Britain, women should be respected and not subjected to sexual assault.
Some will predictably claim that the villagers of Piddington are NIMBYs (not in my back yard). Indeed, the villagers of Piddington are largely white, they love their cocker spaniels, and the village children are dressed in smart school uniforms. Lisa Nandy, speaking for the government in Westminster, said that migrants should not be housed “only in the poorer communities.”
But the “Principality of Piddington” reveals something much deeper: a boiling anger among British citizens at the government’s incapacity to deal effectively with illegal small-boat Channel crossings, which — as of 1 August 2026 — had already seen 14,526 people enter this way this year alone, on top of the 45,774 who arrived by small boat in 2022, and the many thousands more who have arrived since.
The erstwhile “King of the North”, the former Mayor of Greater Manchester and now the latest British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, says he has noted the protest in Piddington. No doubt American President Donald J. Trump will have something to say on the matter of controlling illegal migration when the two men meet for their first face-to-face encounter since Burnham became Prime Minister, at the UN in New York City next week.