There is nothing fair about the plan to dump illegal migrants on Linton-on-Ouse - Andrew Vine

According to our Prime Minister, the plan to dump 1,200 illegal migrants on a small village in the Yorkshire countryside is all about fairness. I’d beg to differ, and so would the residents of Linton-on-Ouse, near York, who face seeing the former RAF base on their doorsteps turned into one of the country’s biggest detention centres for asylum seekers.

There’s nothing fair about this plan. On the contrary, it would be a monstrously unfair imposition on a rural community without the means to cope with a mass influx of mostly young men.

Andy Burnham was guilty of spouting sanctimonious rubbish when he said last week it was only fair for middle-class areas to take a share of the migrants who have to be accommodated, because too much emphasis had been placed on housing them in deprived areas.

Not only sanctimonious, but actively offensive too. His view, and what it probably means for the residents of Linton-on-Ouse, really sticks in the throat here in Yorkshire.

That’s because – on the evidence of the government’s own figures – our county is among the four areas of England which already overwhelmingly house these migrants, along with London, the north-west and the West Midlands.

That means we are already doing more than our fair share of providing accommodation for the 97,500 awaiting decisions on whether they can stay in Britain, so Mr Burnham has no business talking about fairness when it comes to us.

I don’t believe he is really concerned about fairness at all in allocating where these migrants are housed when an end finally comes to accommodating them in hotels.

This is instead a matter of playing politics, with Linton-on-Ouse an unwitting pawn in a grubby game.

Mr Burnham has his eye on scoring points with his party’s traditional voters by indulging in a bit of old-fashioned class warfare.

It looks to me as if he has decided to stick it to comfortably-off areas whose political sympathies are more inclined towards the Conservatives, with the intention of getting a few cheers from the more left-wing of his backbenchers.

That is also to be seen in the plan to dump migrants on a village in rural Oxfordshire, Piddington, where residents find themselves in a similar plight to the people of Linton.

There are few votes for Labour in these areas, so saddle them with a problem nobody wants in their backyard. This is a cynical ploy and blows a hole in Mr Burnham’s carefully-cultivated image as a man of principle.

So much for the new politics of consensus and cross-party co-operation he trumpeted so loudly on taking office.

We’ve been down this road before since Labour won power in 2024. The way Linton-on-Ouse and other villages are being treated has echoes of the hostility towards the countryside expressed by the government under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership.

Rural communities were treated with scorn, and told they would have to accept building on greenbelt land whether they liked it or not. The unspoken attitude towards them was that they were affluent Tories who had got their own way for too long.

Mr Burnham can try as much as he likes to frame the issue of a detention centre in Yorkshire as a matter of fairness, but no amount of rhetoric can disguise the fact that the plan is as flawed now as it was when the Conservatives abandoned it in 2022.

Even his own colleagues object, notably the Labour mayor of York and North Yorkshire, David Skaith, and the York Central MP, Rachael Maskell.

Their objections are unarguably sensible – that the village is simply the wrong place to put more than 1,000 people and the surrounding area offers inadequate support for them.

There is an element of displacement activity in this. The rows over using former military bases close to villages diverts from the fact that the government is doing precious little to stem the flow of illegal migrants.

The recent crossing of the Channel by a boat with 230 people aboard – not far short of the number a medium-sized passenger jet carries – marks an escalation in the people smugglers’ vile trade, and it is plain that the fortune being paid by Britain to France to stop the boats putting to sea is not achieving results.

Mr Burnham has had a relatively easy ride on the issue of illegal migration during his first few weeks in office, but that will rapidly change if boats regularly arrive on the beaches of the south coast with hundreds of people aboard.