UK Parliamentary Supremacy Comes Home To Roost

Like Ceuta, the plight of the UK village Piddington hasn't received major attention in US media:

A tiny English village has voted overwhelmingly to leave the United Kingdom in a symbolic referendum triggered by government plans to house more than 1,200 male asylum seekers at a former military site nearby.

Residents of Piddington, a rural village in Oxfordshire, voted 285 to 26 to "secede from the UK and pursue self-determination," with a turnout of nearly 92%. The vote has no legal force.

Piddington has a population of around 350 people. The asylum accommodation plan would house up to 1,256 asylum seekers, more than three times the population of the village, at a former British military base in Bicester, half a mile from Piddington.

The site would operate as a non-detained asylum accommodation, meaning the asylum seekers would be able to come and go. The proposed development would operate for 10 years, the U.K. Home Office said.

The citizens of Piddington rightly object that with 1200 males boarded within walking distance of the village without women or families, it will suddenly be impossible for local women to be outdoors. A second village, Barnham, is in a near identical situation and mulling a Piddington-style "referendum", although this would be an equally futile gesture.

I've discovered that Chrome AI mode is quite good at explaining the UK "constitution". I asked it, "Do citizens in the US have protections against the government relocating migrants Piddington style near rural towns that aren't available in the UK?" It answered,

Yes, US citizens have structural and constitutional protections against top-down federal site placement that are generally not available to citizens in the UK. The situation in the UK—demonstrated by the village of Piddington voting symbolically to "secede" from the UK after the national Home Office unilaterally decided to place 1,250 asylum seekers at a nearby Ministry of Defence base—highlights a system of highly centralized authority.

The differences in legal recourse and citizen protections between the two nations come down to federalism, constitutional checks on land use, and local governance power.

In the UK, The Westminster government possesses supreme legal authority (parliamentary sovereignty). If the central Home Office decides to bypass local planning authorities using emergency powers or Crown immunity on central government property (like MoD Bicester near Piddington), local councils and citizens have almost no legislative veto power. Their only real option is a "Judicial Review" in court, which only checks if the government followed its own bureaucratic rules, not whether the decision itself was fair to the town.

The US operates under a system of dual sovereignty divided between the federal government and individual states. The federal government does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally commandeer state or local resources, personnel, or local zoning laws to manage, house, or process migrants.

In the US, local governments rely heavily on Zoning Laws and "Home Rule" charters to dictate how land within their borders is used. If the federal government or a federal contractor attempts to buy or lease private land near a rural town to build a massive migrant processing or housing facility, they must generally comply with local municipal zoning ordinances (e.g., environmental impact reports, occupancy limits, sewage capacity, and commercial vs. residential permits).

A footnote to the Pddington question that's covered in the YouTube video embedded above is that the residents of Piddington, who are actually modern upscale elite, not traditional English yeomen, were actually near-unanimous in supporting migrants, and they changed their tune only when they realized they'd be moving in next door. But there's the problem, Parliament doesn't need to get anyone's permission.

Basically, UK citizens lack the constitutional protections US citizens have that prevent the government from unleashing illegal migrants on local communities without providing any sort of protection -- the local police will simply be overwhelmed. The Southampton police have already said they can't manage just the protests against migrant dinghy landings, much less the migrants themselves.

The UK system of government as it emerged from the 1600s is currently failing its citizens. This essay misses that point:

The Jerusalem Cross is going up on A-road lampposts. Richard the Lionheart kit at Reform rallies. Templars at Tommy Robinson marches. “Christ is King!” cried by Danny Tommo and his lot down in Dover. Crusader crosses are quietly usurping the Cross of St George — itself a crusader cross — at Portsmouth, London and points between. The algorithm is pumping out AI knight reels faster than a medieval pope pumping out papal bulls. England is Crusadesmaxxing.

. . ,. Crusadesmaxxing is nationwide. Our national flag came to us, bit by bit, by way of the Templars. Our patron saint St George entered the hearts of Englishmen at the Siege of Antioch in 1098. There the warrior saint arrived with a blazing white banner, succouring the knights to victory. At the Battle of Arsuf less than a century later our allegiance to the warrior saint was sealed. There he joined King Richard’s cavalry charge in the humiliation of Saladin, Butcher of the East.

. . . Explaining the Crusader comeback doesn’t take too much imagination. Hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants, predominantly from Muslim-majority countries, is no doubt a part of it. When Pakistani rape-gang survivors like Ella Hill recount being told that white “kafir” girls are slags who “don’t obey Allah” and therefore had it coming, my blood boils. The stories match the abuse of Christians in the Holy Land a millennium ago. Today’s lanyard elites have ignored it. But the chain-mail elites did not.

The writer almost -=- but not quite -- grasps that the UK public appears to be adopting what is essentially a pre-Reformation metaphorical structure:

Luther lashed the Crusades to the papacy he hated. The friar changed his tune somewhat when the Turks laid siege to Vienna in 1529. How convenient. Then came the Enlightenment. Edward Gibbon wrote in his Decline and Fall…: “The principle of the crusades was a savage fanaticism; and the most important effects were analogous to the cause.” Voltaire added that it was plunder and papal ambition, not defence or piety, that inspired the Christian soldiers.

The problem is that the English, and then the UK, government tied itself to Protestantism. The whole subtext of Charles I's execution, the 1688 Revolution, and the 1701 Settlement Act was that the country was officially Protestant. The problem is that this sort of respectable Protestantism has run its course. Charles III is some sort of goofy New Age type who's lately been playing footsie with Muslims, but that's where Proteatantism has been headed.

In effect, by adopting pre-Reformation imagery, the UK protesters are assserting that another major feature of national life, the Church of England, has failed them and isn't maintaining a defense against Islam, although Protestantism never really did. If there's any hope for the UK, it's going to have to back up to pre-Reformation times, take a hard look at the US Constitution, and start over.