Last week, leaders of the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Féin soft-launched their idea for a dismantled United Kingdom, which I’m sure gave nationalists across the isles a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, you know, like that our ‘special relationship’ with the US gives the French.

The topic would’ve no doubt made for some prickly questions for Andy Burnham to diplomatically navigate in this week’s PMQs, had Parliament not gone into recess for a spot of party showboating.

Nevertheless, a source of Labour headaches emerged from a small Oxfordshire village, as their 350-strong group of plucky locals voted FOR their parish’s independence from the United Kingdom, by 285 votes to 26, no less.

Now, I’m led to believe that the village in question, Piddington, or The People’s Republic of Piddington, as we should perhaps grow accustomed to calling it, has no relation to Michael Bond’s beloved young Peruvian bear. However, it is possible that if he had written A Bear Called Paddington today, our furry friend may well have found himself accompanying 1,256 other young, male asylum seekers just down the road from Piddington, in deepest, darkest Bicester.

As you’d expect, the prospect of that many foreign nationals being ushered into a tight-knit community ruffled a few feathers, but the most powerful and notable pushback came from the 130 or so women of the village who wrote in unison to every single female Member of Parliament to share their fears about the possible impact on safety and security in the local area. 

To express that they’ll no longer “feel safe walking our streets”, as these women did in their letter, is quite a remarkable concern in this day and age, yet it’s one that the Prime Minister appears to have batted away as one of many “difficult, difficult decisions” he seems so forced to be making. 

Notice how that’s more or less the same line that Burnham’s predecessor would spew out every time he had to make a decision (or undo one, for that matter), and the country soon grew sick of that. We can only assume, then, that this constant source of Labour leaders crying rivers of tears must be some sort of Whitehall policy invention to prove that there are, in fact, rivers in the UK that haven’t yet had sewage spilled into them. 

The headaches of this issue proved to be widespread too, as Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy gave us a Nicola Murray-esque performance on Times Radio. The question of whether the asylum seekers would be able to wander freely from the Ministry of Defence facility into the village, whenever they please, seemed a little too challenging for her, until her eventual sheepish and stubborn answer of “well… yes.” 

It’s probably safe to assume that this policy falls on the pissy-off ledge of the Overton window, and that Labour’s policy gurus would be all too aware of this. In fact, that’s probably what brought them to the conclusion that the best-suited doorstep for these asylum seekers to show up on should be one which fell in a Tory-voting constituency for over a century, and only went as left as the Liberal Democrats in the 2024 upheaval.

It would seem, then, that this Labour government has conceded that Piddington falls in a part of the UK that’s bound to go one shade of blue or the other in the next general election, explaining why they appear to have given up on any sort of engagement or reconciliation with locals.

I guess that leaves us to conclude that, what with Labour’s popularity lagging in the devolved nations, it’s only a matter of time until Andy Burnham decides it’s time for Faslane’s nuclear submarine fleet to become bunkmates with the next mega dinghy to turn up on our shores.