‘Free, Free Piddington!’

This week, a Labour member of the British Parliament asked whether his country should take “military action” against Israel.

Tahir Ali, the MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, was speaking during a debate on the disarmament of Hamas when he asked whether Israel should also be disarmed and then went considerably further: “Isn’t it about time that military action is taken against Israel also?”

Ali initially defended the argument publicly. He later deleted the post and apologized, saying that he did not support action against a country.

Alongside this, a much stranger British story is unfolding: a tiny English village named Piddington has just voted to leave the United Kingdom.

The Oxfordshire village, home to roughly 350 people, held a deliberately theatrical, legally meaningless independence referendum, think Conch Republic, after the British government proposed housing more than 1,200 asylum seekers nearby.

And it was a landslide: 285 voted for independence, 26 against. The proposed new state has been styled the “Principality of Piddington.”

Underneath the performance is a considerably more serious dispute about consent.

Whatever one thinks of Britain’s asylum policy, the reaction from the neighboring village tells a familiar story: local opinion being treated as secondary to decisions made elsewhere.

We see versions of it all too often. Consent is flatly ignored. Russia invaded Ukraine without any internationally recognized referendum authorizing Russian rule, then staged votes under occupation that the UN rejected. On the Syrian side of the Golan, Druze residents of Hader publicly called to join Israel and shouted their agreement when asked, days after the UN reaffirmed its position that the Golan is Syrian territory. And Somaliland has governed itself for more than three decades and overwhelmingly endorsed a constitution affirming independence in 2001, yet Britain still refuses to recognize it.

Piddington is not some right-wing stronghold. It lies in Cherwell’s Launton and Otmoor ward, which elected Liberal Democrat candidates in 2023, 2024 and again in May 2026. In the election weeks before the asylum-center announcement, the Liberal Democrats received 1,244 votes, ahead of Reform UK’s 874 and the Conservatives’ 692.

A community in a Liberal Democrat-voting area was presented with a major central-government plan, says it was barely consulted about it, and responded by staging a vote to withdraw from the country altogether.

Isn’t it amazing how opinions can do a 180 as soon as one has skin in the game? For Israelis, that feels all too familiar, especially after peace activists such as Vivian Silver were amongst the first murdered on October 7.

Britain, of all countries, should understand the symbolism of people declaring that decisions are being made by distant and uncaring elites. It has heard variations of that argument before. A few examples that come to mind:

United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Sudan, Ghana, Malaysia, Cyprus, Nigeria, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Malta, Zambia, The Gambia, Maldives, Guyana, Botswana, Lesotho, Barbados, Yemen, Mauritius, Eswatini, Fiji, The Bahamas, Grenada, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Kiribati, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Zimbabwe, Vanuatu, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Brunei, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE.

When there is turmoil in their own backyard, it is remarkably easy for British elites to point elsewhere, especially at Israel, whose independence followed the end of British rule. Figures in the Liberal Democrats and Greens repeatedly return to the narrative of Jews as foreign “colonists” whose sovereignty is uniquely questionable, while problems at home receive rather less attention.

The contrast is too ironic to ignore: a British MP invokes military action against Israel while, at home, hundreds of his own country’s citizens stage a vote for independence because they believe their government does not listen to them.

Just don’t hold your breath for “Free Piddington” chants.