Badenoch visits Piddington over MoD base asylum plan

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch visited villagers who voted to quit the UK in a symbolic referendum held in protest against plans to house migrants on Ministry of Defence (MoD) land.

Villagers in Piddington, near Bicester, voted last Tuesday over Home Office proposals to house about 1,300 male asylum seekers at MoD Bicester.

Badenoch told reporters the plan was a "safeguarding issue", with some living there telling her that they worried about their safety.

Last week, culture secretary Lisa Nandy said the government would not reconsider the plan.

It announced in June it wanted to place the men at MoD Bicester, along with others at sites in Suffolk and North Yorkshire.

Lawyers representing a local community interest company took the first formal step towards a possible judicial review against the government using the Oxfordshire base last week.

Badenoch said she would "intervene" to stop the plan and a government led by her would leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

"I think it's more than an immigration issue right now. This is a women's issue. This is a safeguarding issue," she said.

"We have 133 women in this village. I have been speaking to quite a lot of them.

"Being outnumbered 10 to one by men whose backgrounds are unknown on a site that is not well situated – it's right next to this children's park – I don't think is right."

The ECHR has become a focal point in the Conservative Party's immigration debate over recent years with senior figures arguing that its provisions have obstructed efforts to deport foreign criminals and failed asylum seekers.

In May, the UK and other European countries signed a landmark declaration in an effort to push courts into how they decide migration cases in a bid to make it easier to deport illegal migrants.

But Badenoch said she still favours leaving.

"We tried everything in government but it didn't work because we didn't leave the convention on human rights," she added.

"If we don't leave the convention on human rights we are not going to stop the boats. The government will say the numbers are falling. That is not because of anything they have done. Numbers have been going down across Europe but they rise up again."

Statistics show UK net migration has dropped to the lowest level, outside of the Covid pandemic, since 2012.

People arriving in the UK dropped by a fifth over 2025, the Office for National Statistics said. The number of asylum applications fell by just over a fifth between July 2025 and June.

Speaking at the weekend, women and equalities minister Bridget Phillipson told the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: "Sadly, yes, women are right to be fearful in society more widely about the attitudes and the normalisation of attitudes towards women and violence against women that I'd hoped we'd made more progress on, and I hoped we put behind us."

She continued: "The reality is, of course, most women who experience violence in our country experience it from a partner or a former partner and many women lose their lives to that violence, but that's the end point.

"The starting point is some of the harmful and toxic and terrible attitudes that women are experiencing and are exposed to, and that's why it has to be all of us pulling together to to take action.

"Whilst yes we should look at individual cases – and I'm not for one second seeking to minimise the concerns that those women raise – this is part of a much bigger challenge that we all of us have to tackle together."