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The Oxfordshire village that voted to leave the United Kingdom last week says its next step is to ask the United States to take it.
Tim McNally, chairman of Piddington Parish Council, told Newsweek the council could seek “the support of the United States to become their 51st state” if the Home Office proceeds with its plan to house asylum seekers at a former military site near the village. He said the council has written to President Trump and delivered a dossier to the American embassy setting out its case. “We know conversations have been had with Trump about this,” McNally said.
Piddington has about 350 residents. On September 15 it voted 285 to 26 to declare itself independent of the United Kingdom, with one spoiled ballot, on a turnout of 92 percent. The vote carried no legal force then and the new request carries none now. A parish council is the smallest unit of English local government, with authority over allotments, bus shelters and village greens. It cannot move a border in either direction.
What the village objects to has not changed. The Home Office intends to house 1,256 single adult male asylum seekers at a disused military site about four and a half miles southeast of Bicester, using the Urgent Crown Development route, which bypasses the local planning authority. Newsweek reports the site backs onto the village playing fields. The number of men proposed is more than three times the number of people who live in Piddington.
The Home Office has not moved. “We recognise the strength of feeling in Piddington and are listening carefully to the concerns being raised,” a spokesman said. He pointed to the government’s work on a fairer distribution of asylum accommodation and to the closing of asylum hotels. Nothing in the statement suggests the site is in question.
The American half of this has one participant so far. The council sent its letter and delivered its dossier. No response from the White House or the embassy has been reported, and admitting new territory to the United States takes an act of Congress rather than a decision by a president.
Four days after Piddington voted, the Suffolk village of Barnham said it was weighing a vote of its own over a plan to house up to 1,250 asylum seekers at MoD Barnham. Its parish council leader had spoken with the organizers in Piddington first.
The Home Office can put 1,256 men beside the playing fields whatever Piddington says. What it cannot do is call that agreed to, and the village has now said so to London and to Washington.
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