BY ALEX STORY
Dreams flee as reality makes an entrance.
Piddington, a small village, the quintessence of old England, a few miles northeast of Oxford, was unceremoniously yanked out of its idyll by a manager bent on its destruction.
Time, it seemed, had left the place alone. No change was needed.
Its 358 population, nestled in the middle of nowhere, had no understandable desire to do so.
Their protection, if any was needed, was our constitution.
Englanders would never be slaves; they had been taught.
They had invested, unwittingly, in trusting the country’s institutions and those who serve them.
In return for that unspoken, and perhaps long forgotten, covenant, they felt secure.
In simple terms, they loved the country and, in turn, the country loved them back.
To the outside world, they were observably English, recognisable to their forefathers a millennium ago.
St Nicholas, the local church, stands in the middle of a village of grey stones and orange bricks. Not far lies an inevitable pond.
And while the pubs disappeared as trends shifted and taxes rose a decade or so ago, watering holes are still found just outside the village’s borders.
Though a neighbour of Luton, a modern and prowling enclave, Piddington’s world felt secure.
Her inhabitants believed they lived in a fortress the walls of which were time and distance. The Lord of the Rings’ Middle Earth was its impregnable moat.
And yet, last week, they voted for independence.
On an 87% turnout, 91% chose to leave the United Kingdom.
In contrast, 67% voted in the 2024 general elections and only 31% voted in the locals, which, respectively, returned Calum Miller, a Liberal Democrat, to parliament, and gave effect to a Liberal Democrats-led coalition for Cherwell District Council.
In short, the independence vote garnered 30% more interest than the general election and 282% more than the locals.
To some, the vote has no legal weight.
But to others, it carries an emotional threat, far graver than its lack of legality might suggest.
We lived through similar votes.
In 2002, Gibraltar overwhelmingly voted against shared UK-Spanish sovereignty on a 97% turnout.
Spain was rejected.
In 2013, 99% of Falklanders voted to remain a British territory. The turnout was 92%.
The Falklands remained.
Votes on sovereignty matter deeply, because it is the simplest and most visceral issue, without which nothing matters.
Rejecting Piddington’s vote would thus be careless.
The village has lost its faith.
The reason is simple, local and instinctual.
They have been marked for destruction.
Indeed, the government has planned to locate 1,250 illegal immigrants less than a mile from St Nicholas Church.
The illegals will outnumber the locals three to one.
Our leadership will sacrifice them, and us, happily, on the altar of international law, whatever that may mean.
It is a fig leaf that barely hides the philosophical chasm that separates us, the ruled, from the rulers.
To their minds, our nation state doesn’t exist. It very much does to us.
This mass import to Piddington will permanently shift the cultural centre point from “vicaress” Cortney Dale, conducting the Sunday morning service at St Nicholas Church in front of empty pews, to one dominated by men convinced that Mo is always right.
There is no overlap, guttural or intellectual.
In a former world, David Callum MP was frightfully at ease with mass immigration and its illegal derivative, so long as its residue went somewhere else.
Until, that is, central government fingered Piddington, in his constituency, for obliteration.
He is now caught.
Having backed the theory of multiculturalism, now, in practice, on his own petard he is hoist.
He is, of course, rejecting Piddington’s obliteration but for secondary, effete reasons.
He says something like it’s the “wrong site”; the “infrastructure” is lacking; and travelling on foot towards Bicester is dangerous without “high viz” jackets.
The big, and convenient, lie sold by revolutionaries to the unsuspecting was, among other things, that all cultures were equal.
They never were.
The truth is simple and intuitive:
Politics rests on culture, the seeds of which are sown in religion.
Our land was part of what was until recently known as Christendom.
Further, the scale matters.
Since 2020, over 200,000 fighting-age men, the tip of the iceberg, and three times the number of the British Army, have crossed illegally.
As a result, the message from Piddington’s independent vote has travelled way beyond its local constraints.
Not least because, in a moving way, it reveals the frailty of our kingdom.
Indeed, when patriotism is seen as a crime, the nation’s sap stops flowing, leading to the rotting of her trunk, her falling pieces belonging to scavengers who grab them first.
Fundamentally, as the late Roger Scruton used to say: “Patriotism is not about being superior to other countries, it’s about loving your own.”
And we did.
Tim McNally, the chairman of Piddington Parish Council, says the council could seek the support of the “United States to become their 51st State”, adding, “we know conversations have been had with Trump about this.”
Parish Councillor Joe Marshall continues: “America have had their independence and civil war, and I think for us we are at the beginning of ours.”
Touching a nerve, he added, “we are paying our taxes without representation.”
That Piddington Parish Council is using the language of a war of liberation, though, is as astounding as its drumbeat loudens.
However, in May 2026, Kemi Badenoch pointed in a similar direction on BBC Radio 4.
Then she said that if you bring “political conflict into an area where we didn’t have political conflict” through uncontrolled immigration, “you end up with civil war.”
More recently, on Talk Radio, Nigel Farage spoke of an invasion, facilitated by “our authorities” that “are acting as a taxi service for illegal migrants.”
He noted the work done by undercover journalist Christian Drogan, who took on the disguise of an illegal immigrant, crossing the Channel on a dinghy.
He watched and filmed, incredulously, as the French Navy picked out half a dozen men, recognised human traffickers, to take them back to the French coast.
As the rest of the illegal immigrants made their way to the English coast, the traffickers, ferried back to France, organised the next delivery.
If Farage, Badenoch and all are right and there is an invasion, what does it imply?
We have notions.
But we must be clear about them, and fast, before Piddington’s termination becomes a routine operation applied to all English towns and villages across the nation.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.