FRANK HAVILAND
Piddington in Oxfordshire is the sort of village which once graced our Christmas Quality Street tins (pre-shrinkflation, naturally). A rural idyll home to approximately 350 carefree souls. No shops, no village pub even (although, as an alcoholic, I am pleased to learn via the parish newsletter that there is a ‘pop-up pub’ held in the Village Hall on the last Friday of every month). From what I have been able to glean, Piddington is quintessentially English: a welcome mixture of tradition, a healthy generational spread of the elderly and young families, and the overriding sense that nothing very dramatic ever happens. Tolkien’s Shire in miniature – or at least it was, until the Home Office noticed it.
All that is now about to change. Up to 1,250 single adult male “asylum seekers” (18-65 years old) are to be housed at the former MoD Bicester – a meagre 600m stone’s throw away. The site is expected to operate for a minimum of ten years, with the first 270 lucky lads arriving by the end of the year. This is a quadrupling of the village’s citizenry – an impossible task of assimilation, even for compatible populations. But rest assured, the Home Office is taking its responsibilities seriously, as it disclosed in its official statement:
- The accommodation is designed to be “largely self-sufficient to minimise any impact on the local community”.
- Prospective tenants will be screened against policing and immigration databases (not much cop, seeing as 98% of them ditch their identification in the Channel).
- “Extensive efforts” are being made to minimise the impact on local health services (as you’d expect from a sudden 400% increase in patients).
- Safety and security is “of the utmost importance”, hence the use of CCTV, biometrics, and the fact that those leaving the site will be required to undergo the rigours of signing out.
- If criminality occurs on site, the “service provider” will have recourse to report it to the police.
Seeing as Thames Valley Police already “require improvement” for investigating crime, I doubt the residents of Piddington feel particularly reassured.
Piddington, as it stands, is the England some of us grew up in. It is the England untarnished by ‘diversity’; the England “white flight” flees to. It is the England where generations of children still play outside – right next to the proposed site itself. All that is about to change forever. And despite successive administrations promising to “do politics differently”, they seem to do so with remarkable affection for the old ways. Thus far, open letters from the parish council have been met with what residents describe as “deafening silence” from the Home Office and the Burnham government.
In the absence of conspiracy, official tolerance for mass illegal immigration is genuinely puzzling. When the Mayor of Amity in Jaws insisted on keeping the beaches open, he was at least driven by the town’s precarious economy. In the case of Piddington, the authorities are importing the risk, placing it beside the primary school, and presenting the bill directly to the residents. Indeed, if we’re going all-in with our Peter Benchley analogy, the townsfolk of Amity were quite happy to stump up the cash to kill the shark. In Britain, all the authorities have to do is resend the shark to sender.
Something ain’t quite right.
The official justification is the usual one: closing hotels, cutting costs, moving people into “basic accommodation”. Basic it certainly is. The site lacks adequate sewage, electricity and water, and (according to residents) is little more than a conglomeration of asbestos huts. The idea that undocumented males are not going to abscond is risible. That’s bad news for Piddington, and Britain as a whole. ISIS were smuggling jihadis into Europe disguised as ‘refugees’ a decade ago. The Iran regime admitted doing the same to Britain only this month.
Such a crisis provides an unusually pertinent test of the Burnham “local first” rhetoric. Having repeatedly pledged to return power to communities in the face of Westminster arrogance, the new Prime Minister has a rare chance to show he puts his money where his second-home allowance is. A successful outcome for Piddington is what the promise of devolution looks like, when political buzzwords meet reality. If a village this small, this united and this peaceful cannot influence a decision that will transform it beyond recognition, then Burnham’s warm words are little more than hot air.
The bad news for the residents of Piddington is that it is hardly a one-off. Crowborough Training Camp in East Sussex and RAF Wethersfield in Essex are already operating on the same model. In Crowborough, as The New Conservative covered extensively, the local opposition has been forthright and determined. And yet, regular marches, protests, and legal challenges have thus far failed to halt the project. Piddington is simply unlucky enough to be the next name on the list.
Nor is the phenomenon limited to Britain. The recent scenes in Ceuta, where tens of thousands of mostly young Moroccan men overwhelmed a Spanish enclave in a matter of hours, offer a more chaotic European variation on the same theme. In Britain, we are more civilised in our replacement – although the clipboards and factsheets provide scant defence against our naked vulnerability.
Faced with impending doom, the residents have reached for the only lever available to them: secession from the United Kingdom. An impressive 96% of residents backed the proposal to “take back control” when a vote was held in the Village Hall; the kind of Brexit numbers Nigel Farage only dreams of. No legal mechanism exists to force the government’s hand – and perhaps that’s just as well. On its current trajectory there would not be much left of Britain if every village could simply secede. Although on the upside, Tower Hamlets would be one step closer to a caliphate.
Piddington is Britain in miniature: local concerns are very much secondary to government largesse. Twenty years ago, a decent pay-cheque meant one could escape the ravages of Blairism. That middle-class cushion alas, no longer carries much weight in the mass immigration pillow fight.
In Benchley’s Jaws, you could at least escape the shark on dry land. In Cameron’s, May’s, Johnson’s, Truss’s, Sunak’s, Starmer’s and now Burnham’s Britain, there is an increasingly short supply of dry land to choose from.
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Frank Haviland is the Editor of The New Conservative, and the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West.
See Related Article Below
Bombshell new figures which show Britain has entered an entirely new demographic era.
They won’t want you to look at these statistics — but you really need to.
MATT GOODWIN
Britain’s population has entered an entirely new era. That’s the message that emerges from some brand new bombshell statistics that were quietly released by the British state yesterday – and which the establishment would rather you not explore.
The figures, buried away in the latest estimates of how the population of England and Wales is changing, released by the Office for National Statistics, are shocking.
What they confirm, first of all, is that Britain has crossed a historic threshold.
Population growth in England and Wales is no longer driven by the British people having children. Last year, what experts call ‘natural change’ among the native people of these islands added only a little more than 19,000 people to the population.
Meanwhile, the primary and overwhelming reason the population grew is because of something else: mass immigration.
As the official figures confirm, it is immigration that just pushed the population of England and Wales to a new record of 62 million people. It is immigration that brought another 816,500 people into the country last year, in just twelve months.
And it is immigration that added — net — another 211,700 people, equivalent to adding a population the size of York to the country in only twelve months.
This marks a profound shift in our country’s history.
For generations, as I point out in my book, the population of these islands grew because more British people were born than died.
This gave us steady, manageable, and familiar change — a degree of churn that was also able to preserve our demographic stability, culture, values, and sense of identity.
While migration certainly ebbed and flowed, it was simply never the dominant force reshaping our population, country, and way of life.
But this is no longer true.
In recent years, Britain entered an entirely new demographic era – one in which immigration, increasingly from outside Europe, has become the primary driver of not just population growth but the radical transformation of entire communities.
You can see this in the chart below, which shows you how ‘natural change’ among the British people has gradually and then completely been eclipsed as the main driver of population growth by immigration — which exploded during the peak of the Boriswave but still remains, by a long way, the main driver of population growth.
If you want to make sense of how truly radical this change is, then don’t just look at the national picture or even only our big cities.
Look at what is now rapidly unfolding in countless smaller cities, towns, and villages up and down these islands, which are rapidly becoming unrecognisable as they are subjected to this constant, unprecedented rate of churn.
As detailed analysis of these new figures, by the brilliant researcher Karl Williams, makes clear, what we’re now living through is a demographic and cultural revolution, like nothing our ancestors could ever have imagined.
In the last year alone, more than 130 local council areas across England and Wales saw their local populations increase by at least 1,000 people — in just twelve months — with 15 of these areas witnessing a sharper increase of at least 3,000 people.
But what is more striking is the scale at which immigration is driving this growth.
In close to one-quarter of all these areas, immigration is responsible for at least 50% of all population growth, utterly transforming their character and demography.
And in eleven of these areas — once you take account of things such as people dying, moving elsewhere, and declines among the settled population — net migration accounts for more than 100% of all population growth.
How can migration account for more than 100% of all population growth? Because without immigration the populations of these areas would likely have shrunk.
Net migration is not only producing all of the population growth in many areas of Britain; it is now also more than offsetting losses to these local populations because of people dying or moving somewhere else. So, what you are left with is unprecedented, almost unbelievable rates of population churn.
Consider a place like Slough.
Between 2024 and 2025 — in just one year — net migration accounted for 281% of all of Slough’s population growth. Without this immigration, Slough’s population, having already experienced nearly thirty years of inward migration, would likely have fallen.
Instead, migration more than compensated for those losses, accounting for the equivalent of nearly 300% of all population growth in Slough.
Or look at Derby. In just one year alone, net migration accounted for 225% of all of Derby’s population growth. In Wolverhampton, it’ 429%. In Bristol, its 322%. In Reading, it’s 208%. In Bolton, it’s 177%.
What we are witnessing in all these areas, alongside many more — in the likes of Newcastle, Harrow, Walsall, Bexley, Peterborough — are local populations being completely upended and unsettled by huge demographic churn in only one year.
And it doesn’t stop there.
Because we can also take a step back and look at how the ‘Boriswave’ – the enormous wave of migration unleashed by Boris Johnson – has completely transformed and destabilised local populations over a longer period of time.
We can see this by looking at how many people were added to areas during the five years of the Boriswave – between the years 2020 and 2025 – and the extent to which net migration accounts for their population growth.
Astonishingly, there are 102 local council areas — from Tewkesbury to Manchester — where local populations during these years surged by at least 10,000 people.
In nearly half of these areas — in 55 of them — net migration was responsible for at least 50% of all population growth. And in many of them, net migration accounts for all or more than all of their growth.
Take Milton Keynes.
Between 2020 and 2025, the population of Milton Keynes exploded by more than 25,000 people. And net migration was responsible for more than half — 60%— of this growth. Anybody who has lived in Milton Keynes in recent years will recognise this.
Or take Coventry, which grew by more than 20,000 people in only five years. In Coventry, net migration has been responsible for 280% of all growth.
People who live in these areas will recognise these changes. and nod along in agreement with the analysis; but many others who live elsewhere in the country will probably not know about the sheer scale of this demographic revolution.
Thanks to the Boriswave, there are now roughly 100 areas in Britain — from Guildford to Oldham, Walsall to Cardiff, Broxtowe to Barnet, Swansea to Stevenage — where net migration accounts for more than 100% of all population growth.
The message is simple.
In countless places that are often ignored in the wider debate about how the country is changing, immigration and rapid demographic churn are completely transforming what we once knew as Britain, or England.
In many of these communities, immigration – often from outside Europe – is now accounting for all, or even more than all, of population growth.
Meanwhile, the secondary effects of people migrating within and around Britain are continuing to spread this ongoing demographic churn far beyond the big cities.
This is no longer just a story about London or areas that have historically had high rates of immigration; it is a story about the very remaking of England itself. Once you look closely at numbers like these, it simply becomes impossible to pretend otherwise.
And do you know the most striking fact in all of this?
Nobody ever voted for it. Nobody ever asked for it. And very few people in the country today say they want it to continue.
Yet continue it does, as a political class in Westminster drifts further and further away from the people they were elected to represent and countless communities up and down these islands find themselves being continuously, relentlessly transformed.
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(UKR)