Residents of a small rural village in Yorkshire are angered and dismayed over Home Office plans to establish a 1,500-strong migrant camp in their midst without prior consultation.
The Priti Patel-led government department, which has broad responsibility for policing, national security, and border control — such as it is — in the Boris Johnson administration, is said to have announced it will be sending the migrants to Linton-on-Ouse, which has a population of only around 700, without any prior consultation with residents, parish councils, or even the District Council.
“There has been no consultation. It has come as a bolt from the blue,” said one local resident, 68-year-old Linda Scarbro, in comments quoted by MailOnline.
“I do not care about their race or religion. It is the fact you will have 1,500 young men roaming around the village and I don’t know what they are going to do,” she said.
“They are free to come and go. The Home Office cannot detain them and the airfield is not secure,” she noted.
News of the massive camp may come as a surprise to Britons further afield, too, who have recently been led to believe that a government which has been failing for years to grip a rapidly worsening illegal immigration crisis would finally resolve the situation by striking an agreement with Rwanda which will see migrant men transferred to that country while their British asylum claims are processed.
The Australia-style scheme is not yet operating and is already under attack in the courts, however — and reports have emerged that the Home Office believes it will only be able to transfer a mere 300 migrants a year under the scheme in any case.
Another Linton-on-Ouse resident, 59-year-old Neil Goodridge, told MailOnline that “relatively liberal” Britain was “all for helping out” asylum seekers for the most part, but that his little village was “the wrong place”.
“We’re a village of 700 people and they are effectively dropping 1,500 single men here. It’s an invasion for us. Down in Westminster they’ve thought, ‘We’ve got a military base which is surrounded by fences’. But it isn’t, it’s a 760-acre open site,” he said.
60-year-old Kathryn Dryden voiced similar concerns about the sheer scale of the planned migrant site, expressing fear that “[t]he figure of 1,500 is just a baseline. It will increase.”
“The Government is dumping them in a small rural village where they will outnumber us two to one if not more,” she lamented.
Many residents stressed the lack of facilities for such a large influx of people, pointing out that the village has little to offer by way of amenities beyond a small shop that “does not sell much except newspapers.”
Only a mere handful of buses run to the city of York, and do not run all day — with MailOnline noting that the price of a return ticket is more than the daily taxpayer-funded allowance given to asylum seekers.
The Linton-on-Ouse migrant camp, which is to be located at a former Royal Air Force (RAF) base, dwarfs another planned development on a military site in Barton Stacey, Hampshire, which was already causing outrage.
This camp would see 500 migrants dumped on the village of 1,000 — a huge demographic transformation but still mild compared to the one planned for Linton-on-Ouse.
Local government officials in Linton-on-Ouse are launching a legal challenge to try and halt the Home Office’s scheme.