Labour will always put mass migration before the safety of women and children

Piddington is a quiet Oxfordshire village of just over 300 people.

It has no school, no real shop – and, thanks to Angela Rayner, it will soon sit half a mile from a camp for more than 1,250 illegal migrant men.

Ministers keep claiming that closing migrant hotels is a victory.

But as Piddington shows, the alternatives may be even worse.

Putting illegal migrants into houses on residential streets, or into large camps next to tiny rural villages, is not a solution.

When people said that they wanted asylum hotels closed, what they meant was that these people should never have been allowed to illegally enter our country in the first place, and they did not want to accommodate them.

Unsurprisingly, local opposition has been overwhelming.

Around 20,000 people signed a petition against the plan, the district council formally objected, and even the local Liberal Democrat MP called it the wrong plan for the wrong site.

Yet rather than recognising the massive risks posed by this camp, the Government used an ‘urgent’ planning process to bypass the council and ram the site through anyway.

Andy Burnham talks a lot about listening to people on the ground.

But when push comes to shove, he’ll always choose mass migration over the safety of women and children — in Piddington, and everywhere else.

Labour’s own Home Office minister has assured people that the men will be “contained in a former military base”.

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But the Government's factsheet admits that they "would not be detained".

More than a thousand men will be free to come and go as they please, on the doorstep of a village full of families.

Ministers seem to think that if illegal migrants are out of sight, they’re out of mind.

For the people of Piddington, they’ll be anything but.

The village just isn’t set up to cope with that level of population increase, regardless of where people come from – much less hundreds of men who all too often pose a danger to the public, particularly women and girls.

Last year in Epping, an illegal migrant who’d been in the country for just eight days and was staying in the local hotel sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl.

No family should have to fear that happening to their own child.

And if that can happen in a hotel, where the authorities can at least monitor people’s movements, the risks are far greater in HMOs, or on an open site housing a thousand men.

The whole system is broken, and keeping it that way is a political choice.

It does not have to be this way.

The next Conservative government would ban asylum claims from illegal entrants and scrap immigration appeals and legal aid, leave the ECHR and repeal the Human Rights Act, establish a Removal Force to deport 150,000 illegal immigrants a year, remove all new illegal arrivals within a week, and use visa sanctions to secure returns and stop illegal migration at the source.

But Piddington is just one example of a much wider problem.

In all sorts of ways, this Labour Government now forces members of the public to live alongside dangerous people – children sharing bathrooms with strangers in temporary accommodation, women fleeing abuse housed alongside violent men, and prison leavers placed on ordinary residential streets – having been released before serving their full sentence.

And then ministers are surprised when people don’t want anything built near them.

The truth is, most people aren’t against development. They’re against a Labour Government that keeps putting them, and their children, in danger.