I know Laleham, about twenty minutes from where I live. Been to the local, the Three Horseshoes, a couple of times, once with Robbie Gibbs, former No.10 comms chief for Theresa May, who lives in the village.
The focus until now of this quiet and leafy Surrey retreat has been the pub. It’s always packed as the food’s good at a fair price.
Today, that focus has moved down the road to a three-bedroomed semi-detached cottage which changed hands last year for just over £500,000.
The new owner then turned the place into a house of multiple occupation, an HMO. They are popping all over the country. And Starmer is in favour of HMOs, as it means Labour can boast they have moved the illegal Channel migrants out of expensive hotels.
But Laleham is a village and therefore the problem, even to somebody as detached as Starmer, would have become very clear, very quickly. And it did. Without prior warning to villagers or councillors, six migrants moved into the cottage.
Two hundred yards away from this cottage is the local primary school. One particular Afghan migrant started hanging around the school. I can’t imagine the alarm that would have caused local mums.
Apparently, the migrant, in his early 20s, would turn up at the school during busy drop-off and pick-up times. His party piece was shouting at women walking alone was a party piece.
Police told him to keep away from the school, but he ignored them, so he was finally arrested by the police, who handcuffed him at the gates of his HMO and held him on suspicion of harassment. Later, he was transferred to a secure facility under the Mental Health Act.
Who on earth in the Home Office thought it a good idea for these six asylum seekers to be placed 200 yards from a primary school? Many come from areas of the world who see nothing wrong with child sex.
The Home Office claim they told Spelthorne Council that the migrants were moving in. The council denies this. It’s really not in the council’s interest to lie while the government couldn’t care less, as we have seen with this week’s performance by the Prime Minister.
Whose mad and bad idea was it to put a migrant HMO near a village school? Shut it now - Kelvin MacKenzie
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Certainly, the local councillor says the arrival of the migrants was a shock to her, and she should have been told, as she is the conduit of important news to the voters.
The reality is that places like Laleham is totally the wrong place for these migrants. A bowling green, a couple of pubs, a tearoom and a traditional Morris dance group.
In truth, a little bit of old England. And Labour doesn’t like that. It wants everywhere to be multicultural. That’s why they love an HMO. They can pile as many of the single young men who arrive from faraway places into these joints as is possible.
At least their local MP raised the issue in the Commons. Spelthorne is our neighbour, but I am not certain that either the Tory group on Elmbridge council or our useless Tory MP Ben Spencer would fight against the HMOs or against asylum seekers being housed next to a primary school.
I do have some evidence. The Lib Dems and Independents on Elmbridge council, which takes in my town of Weybridge, ganged up to stop the lone Reform councillor from giving his views about the idea of migrants being put up in a local hotel.
He wasn’t even allowed to speak by a piece of political trickery. With luck, those Lid Dems will be thrown out on May 7. The Tories, too, will be lucky to hold on to their seats as they try to face both ways on the migrant issue.
The furore in quiet old Laleham shows that the migrant issue is very much alive and explains how in the last YouGov poll, Reform were 27 per cent, an incredible 10 per cent ahead of The Tories and Greens at 17 per cent.
If that were replicated at a General Election, I suspect Reform would have a majority of more than 200.
Perhaps that would signal the end of HMOs, and even better than that, the great migrant pushback could begin.
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