Shabana Mahmood threatens to unleash ‘full force of the law’ against ‘far-right racist’ Danny Tommo

The Patriot Platform co-founder warned he could send thousands of people to the Oxfordshire village “for days” to block more than 1,200 illegal male migrants from being housed at the site.

But Ms Mahmood said she “wanted to reassure” locals that the migrants will not “put pressure” on local resources, claiming the men will be handed “self-contained facilities” at the asylum centre.

She also accused anti-migration activists of “hijacking” community concerns and insisted she wanted to distinguish them from concerned residents.

The Home Secretary said: “I understand the anxiety of local people when they’re about to see a change to their community.

“But it is important to distinguish that anxiety, where reasonable people can have a conversation, and the far right and outright racists like Danny Thomas walking into town, hijacking an issue and then using that to divide our communities.

“Their behaviour is completely unacceptable. And where they break the law, they will face the full force of the law.”

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The people of Piddington signalled their opposition to the Home Office plans to outnumber them in their own community on Wednesday, as they voted to secede from the United Kingdom for the second time.

The symbolic referendum saw more than 91 per cent of the 311 votes cast in favour of self-determination.

Danny Tommo visited the community on his own the day after the result, before visiting the MoD site into which the male migrants are set to be moved.

Parish councillor Joe Parish revealed he had been invited for a tour of the village and a chat about the community’s concerns.

He said: “It is a closed meeting. We will engage with them and walk them around the village and have a cup of tea.

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“We have also had an open invitation to Reform, Labour, Conservatives and Restore to visit.”

In an interview about his time in the village, the 37-year-old said: “The people we are meeting are just normal mothers, normal grandmothers, normal men.

“We have to start somewhere. Right now there are no men in that camp. We are going to put a legal, lawful plan in place to help this community in a way that has never been done before.”

Responding to the Piddington residents’ historic vote, Ms Mahmood said: “I want to reassure the residents of Piddington that actually our experience from other large sites where we already have, asylum seekers accommodated, whether that’s in Wethersfield or Crowborough, is that putting all facilities on to one site is actually the best way to manage pressures for local communities.

“Our experience of other large sites where we are housing asylum seekers is that we’re able to put on that site more of the facilities that asylum seekers need.

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“It’s a relatively self-contained facility, and the knock-on pressure to those local areas, I don’t think we’re going to see.”

The Home Secretary said she understood the fear from locals who are bracing for a “change in their community”, as she claimed some anxieties may have been fuelled by residents “reading misinformation on the internet”.

She also insisted that those fears were not solely reserved for those living in Britain’s countryside, but urban areas as well.

“I also hear that concern from communities such as mine, where there are large numbers of HMOs [houses of multiple occupation] and accommodation in which asylum seekers are held as well,” Ms Mahmood said.

“There is concern across every type of community. Not just in the countryside or in those sorts of areas, but in inner-city areas as well.”