EXCLUSIVE: Express reporter Michael Knowles found a village full of worried locals, all asking themselves the same question.
Villagers are fighting the asylum camp plans in Linton-on-Ouse (Image: Andy Stenning/Daily Express)
To see it, is to believe it. I counted it out. It took 20 steps from the curb next to a family home to the fence of a migrant camp set to hold 1,250 asylum seekers. Everyone I spoke to had the same thought – “am I going to move home?” Some admitted “I’m getting out now”. Others, particularly those who have bought their properties, clung on to hope that the Home Office’s plan could be stopped.
This, tragically, is because they don’t believe they will be able to sell even if they want to. I walked around the base’s perimeter several times. Each time, it struck me how exposed the houses were. A military accommodation block loomed over White Rose Close. Occupants will be able to see into people’s homes, or gardens. A gentle stroll from the camp’s gates takes you straight into a housing estate. Turn right, and you walk through a neighbourhood of three- and four-bed detached houses.
Martin Sanderson warned of the dire impact (Image: Andy Stenning/Daily Express)
As you follow the road round, you reach the end of the cul-de-sac and a children’s playground. That itself backs onto the base. In the corner, a small see-through fence prevented access to and from the military base.
If you turn left from the camp’s gates, you’re met with a sorry state of affairs.
Amid a housing crisis, a litany of houses are laying empty. There are no curtains in the properties, no sign of life.
The only thing to mark their existence is a “to let” sign. While the hope exists that they will be one day filled, the number of empty properties in the North Yorkshire village is growing.
And this is something that the campaigners – ordinary folk who want to go about their lives – were at pains to explain.
For all of Shabana Mahmood’s insistence that “large sites” are the solution to the asylum accommodation crisis, the only “large” impact is on the village community itself.
Spending tens, potentially hundreds, of millions on converting a former military base into asylum accommodation barely makes a dent in the overall number receiving taxpayer-funded support. There will still be tens of thousands in dispersal accommodation and hotels.
Yet it devastates that area, ripping the heart out of a community and changing its makeup forever.
As Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp put it, “they will be outnumbered two to one”.
Campaigners gather with Tory MPs in Linton (Image: Andy Stenning/Daily Express)
And campaigners detailed the fundamental flaw in Labour’s rhetoric. If large sites are the solution, they’ll need 74 of them.
There are not 74 MoD sites, so what now? Is it going to be office blocks? Abandoned warehouses? That’s been floated before – whatever happened to those proposals? They surely weren’t whimsical thinking…
One neighbour the Daily Express spoke to said he grew up in the village. He said as a teenager, the only thing to do was to go to the shop.
However, that shop has now gone. And many villagers believe the migrants will gravitate towards the children’s playground, because it is all there is in the village.
And it was clear to me, in the crisp October wind, that this is the frontline of Labour’s asylum accommodation crisis.
As is Piddington. As is Barnham.
Because, as one campaigner said as we were walking the 10 minute from the camp to the local primary school, this is about the rules being enforced properly.
Britain’s borders are routinely exposed and abused.
And this is consequence – communities being gutted.
Livelihoods ruined.
And it’s utterly tragic.