This week the soon-to-be-hated Oxfordshire hamlet of Piddington’s apocalyptically naive inhabitants voted to secede from the UK because of their understandable anxiety over the Home Office’s proposed housing of 1,250 undocumented migrant men of fighting age in disused army buildings nearby. The sudden arrival of loads of unknown males anywhere is always a worry. Look at what happened to Troy when those foreigners of fighting age all came out of that horse, resisted cultural assimilation, refused to learn the language, and then rampaged around the city centre upsetting urns.
For Andy Burnham, eyeing Reform-tempted-voter optics, being seen to house migrants in old army buildings probably looked better than housing them in luxury five-star hotels, which never happened anyway outside Nigel Farage’s fabricated social media feeds and the kind of GB News bulletins the gutless Ofcom regulator chooses to regard as mere “entertainment”.
But the shy Reform voter probably preferred it, nonetheless, in the good old days of The Suella Braverman Crisis Management Masterclass, when fighting-age migrants were kept in Kent, sleeping on sheets of wet cardboard in winter in overcrowded tents surrounded by chicken wire, while being firebombed by a white-supremacist terrorist of fighting age. That was justice!
I hope the Piddingtexiteers see the process through. And enjoy the queues for the biometric border checks at Bicester
Will Piddington hold its nerve in its decision to leave the UK? I hope so. Brexit was the word for Britain exiting the EU. What is the word for Piddington exiting the UK? Is it Piddingtexit? I hope so. And I hope the Piddingtexiteers see the process through, and suffer all the now objectively demonstrable economic damage cutting themselves off from their largest and nearest trading and employment partner would do. And enjoy the queues for the biometric border checks at Bicester. This is what you voted for. Piddingtexit means Piddingtexit! Take back control!! Protect our women and girls!!!
To be fair, the global human tide of the global migrant crisis, doubtless soon to be severely exacerbated by El Niño climate-change chaos and Russia’s imminent and presumably Trump-tolerated invasion of eastern Europe, had previously largely impacted on grimly ruined Reform-groomed working-class people in grimly ruined Reform-groomed seaside towns. But last week it burst its British banks. And now it is lapping at the parish boundaries of the kind of gentle rural English community once only threatened by this week’s Midsomer Murders plotline.
DCI Barnaby! There are 1,000 undocumented migrants in the old army camp, potentially molesting our wives and daughters! What shall we do? Shall we welcome support from the white supremacist billionaire and online AI child-porn facilitator Elon Musk? Yes! Protect our women and girls!
Piddington’s ill-considered, tone-deaf response to the Home Office’s poorly-PR’d decision will now for ever be remembered as a tipping point in modern Britain’s descent into a swirling Charybdis cesspool of cognitive dissonance. I don’t blame the Piddingtexiteers for being anxious about the migrants’ arrival. But I do blame them for naively allowing their cause to be co-opted, as it obviously was going to be, by the very worst people on Earth, a week after the far-right religious roofing contractor Daniel “Danny Tommo” Thomas, who is of fighting age, whipped up enough anti-migrant hysteria to see gaslit goons of fighting age force the closure of a Portsmouth lifeboat station suspected of being too soft on anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves dying at sea. Protect our women and girls!
Daniel “Danny Tommo” Thomas is now planning to blockade the army camp with 5,000 men of fighting age, a significantly higher than average percentage of which, if the statistical breakdown of previous anti-migrant protests replicate themselves in Piddington, will have convictions for domestic violence. Protect our women and girls. I hope Piddington has the facilities to accommodate the needs of this sudden influx of supporters, who have historically left central London awash with steaming streams of hot urine during those similarly patriotic Unite the Kingdom rallies.
“How powerful would it be if 5,000 men surround the camp,” Daniel ‘Danny Tommo’ Thomas has opined, “we take tents. We sit there for days and we don’t let them get in. And then we reinforce with members from the north, from Scotland, from Ireland.” It sounds like a Cub Scout camping trip run by Oswald Mosley. Akela! We will do our best!! Protect our women and girls!!!
And remember, elderly environmental protesters, not of fighting age, were jailed for simply planning similar protests while Daniel “Danny Tommo” Thomas remains conspicuously at large. And of fighting age. This is what two-tier policing looks like. It seems there’s one law for 5,000 masked men of fighting age in balaclavas barricading an army camp, and quite another for elderly Greenpeace members who have knitted themselves to a lamp-post.
As I file this, on Friday morning from the breakfast suite of a Premier Inn of fighting age in Lowestoft, Daniel “Danny Tommo” Thomas is being provided with a personal tour of Piddington. Joe Marshall, a parish councillor of fighting age, said yesterday: “It is a closed meeting. We will engage with them and walk them around the village and have a cup of tea.” My worry is, where is this cup of tea happening? And is it of fighting age? Hopefully the tea will not be served in a local resident’s own kitchen. Because when Graham Page invited Daniel “Danny Tommo” Thomas into his home in 2016, a case of mistaken identity involving a missing £10,000 worth of drugs led to the wrong Graham Page escaping an attempted kidnapping by Daniel “Danny Tommo” Thomas after being attacked with a machete in front of his partner. Protect our women and girls!
The Wildlife and Countryside Act maintains it is an offence to damage the breeding sites of rare amphibians. Protect our newts and toads!
Ironically it now appears that woke tofu-smeared environmental laws may be cynically commandeered to render the Piddington camp inoperable where Danny “Danny Tommo” Thomas and his useful idiots of fighting age in the Piddingtexit campaign might yet fail. Claire Brenner, a local resident of fighting age with a zoology degree, analysed documents at Thames Valley environment records centre and claims there is evidence of a breeding population of newts, of fighting age, at the camp. The Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 maintains it is an offence to damage or destroy the breeding sites or resting places of rare amphibians. Protect our newts and toads!
I hope Piddington survives its time in the eye of the storm its foolish Piddingtexiteers failed to see coming. And I hope its minority of non-white residents feel safe, and can rebuild relationships with their thoughtless neighbours who have thrown them to the wolves by welcoming people like Elon Musk and Daniel “Danny Tommo” Thomas and his rentamob into their world. But the tide of history has swept over the tiny hamlet many times before.
Originally held by the Danish warlord Hacun, after our initial annexation by Europe in 1066 Piddington was given to the Norman noblewoman Judith, Countess of Huntingdon, before, due to a complex inheritance arrangement, being ceded to an order of nuns by King Malcolm IV of Scotland. Noble families of French descent reclaimed Piddington but their lands were taken from them after they supported Philip II of France against King John in the French war of 1202-14, before then being granted by Henry II to a Breton named Alan Plukenet. The village’s Parish Church of St Nicholas contains a faded 14th-century mural, that somehow survived the desecrations of Henry VIII’s time, depicting St Christopher, that patron saint of travellers. In Piddington he is depicted carrying the infant Christ across a river on his back.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run.
Stewart’s new book, Pea Green Boat, is available now, and so is a DVD of his last live show, Basic Lee.
And he appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around Pea Green Boat at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October, and at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, on the same project but with the dream-pop prodigy Stone Anthem, on 11 October