A quiet North Yorkshire village of roughly 600 people is set to be flooded with around 1,200 single adult male asylum seekers at the nearby disused RAF Linton-on-Ouse base. Local women would be outnumbered six to one.
Labour MP Rachael Maskell has raised the alarm over the plan, which forms part of the government’s wider push to move roughly 3,750 people into three former military sites near villages as it tries to empty asylum hotels.
The base sits beside a primary school and nursery, has only four buses a day into York, and already faces severe shortages of water, sewage capacity and electricity. Maskell has written to border security and asylum minister Anna Turley and is due to meet Home Office officials this month.
“It’s just the wrong site,” Maskell said. “The last government realised that, once they got into the detail. All we’re saying to this Government is that it’s really important that they recognise that too, because the site is in a worse state now than it was when the Government last looked at this.”
Similar plans for Linton-on-Ouse were abandoned in 2022 after fierce local opposition. Now they are back under active consideration. Local Tory councillor Malcolm Taylor captured the mood of residents who moved there for a quiet life: “They’ve moved there for the peace, tranquillity and quality of life. This hand grenade has been thrown in.”
Professor Olga Matthias of the Linton Action Group called the village “categorically the wrong place for so many reasons.”
‘That doesn’t add up at all with what the left have been telling us.’
‘It’s the hypocrisy.’
Mark Littlewood and Nina Myskow discuss a Labour MP who has warned that a plan to move more than 1,000 asylum seekers next to a small Yorkshire village. pic.twitter.com/onBRdNHwyF
— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 12, 2026
This is not an isolated case. It follows the same pattern seen in the tiny Oxfordshire village of Piddington, population around 350–400, which faces plans for 1,250 single adult male asylum seekers at a former Ministry of Defence depot right next to a children’s playing field.
Residents held a symbolic independence referendum in which 96 percent voted to leave the United Kingdom in protest. Children wrote letters pleading with the Prime Minister not to destroy the only home they have ever known. Parish council chairman Tim McNally has repeatedly warned that the scale is neither fair, safe nor responsible.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has responded by doubling down. He insists that “all parts of the country need to play their part” and that middle-class and leafy areas can no longer be shielded while poorer communities carry the load.
Borders minister Anna Turley has defended the approach as creating a “more fair and equitable system,” even while acknowledging that concentrating arrivals in deprived areas previously fuelled “civil unrest.”
The same government that lectures about fairness is also quietly imposing itself on other quiet rural communities. In the tiny Welsh seaside village of Gronant, population around 1,600, residents discovered that their former village hall — converted into 15 new-build homes they expected to go to local families or the open market — had been handed over to asylum seekers.
Thirteen of the fifteen units were taken by Home Office contractor Clearsprings. Blacked-out minibuses arrived without warning. Locals described it as pure betrayal. One resident, Kerrie Cox, said nobody was told about the arrivals. Another called it an “absolute betrayal.”
These placements keep following the same template. Single adult men, overwhelmingly of fighting age, are being directed into the most culturally alien, high-trust, low-density English and Welsh villages imaginable — places defined by quiet streets, children’s parks, limited public transport, and a long-standing sense of safety.
The contrast could scarcely be sharper. It repeatedly seems like an intentional choice designed to generate the maximum possible friction and cultural upheaval. They could not possibly find locations more foreign to the backgrounds of many of these arrivals.
The government claims the military sites will keep people “contained.” In practice, residents are free to come and go. Infrastructure is inadequate. Policing is already stretched thin in these rural areas. Women and girls who once walked freely after dark now face the prospect of living in communities where adult men from very different cultural norms suddenly outnumber them by orders of magnitude.
This is the logical endpoint of a policy that refuses to stop the boats while insisting every corner of the country must absorb the consequences. Closing hotels and shifting people into former barracks or new-build village homes does not reduce the pull factor. It upgrades the destination.
The result is the steady erosion of the very places that once defined the character of rural Britain — one quiet village at a time.
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