As GB News reports, on the authority of the Local Democracy Reporting Service, a crowded meeting was held on Saturday, 24 October, in the Suffolk village called Barnham. Of the eighty present only seven voted against the motion; the rest decided that a popular vote on leaving the United Kingdom should be held, following the example of the village of Piddington, which had already held such a vote as a symbolic gesture. The Home Office's plan was to lodge asylum seekers at the nearby air base, all of them, it is said, young single men, at first 1,250; but on Friday it was made public that the number had been cut to 913. The village itself has about six hundred inhabitants. John Bauer, chairman of the parish council, said the villagers wished to show how deeply they resented the government deciding, without consulting anyone, a matter that would change the nature of the village. A Home Office spokesman replied that it was seeking a fairer distribution across the whole country, closing all the hotels, and moving the asylum seekers to former military sites, which, being self-contained and guarded day and night by security and electronic cameras, would do less harm to their neighbours.

Let us judge this work, then, by the rule I laid down in my first book: "All these must be built with due regard to soundness, usefulness and beauty." Symmetry, moreover, is the fitting agreement of a work's members with one another, and the correspondence of each part to the form of the whole. If a sculptor made a hand larger than the head, he would be laughed at; yet here a limb larger than the body is being attached, for 913 men are set beside six hundred souls, among whom are counted mothers, old men and children. A town made up of men of one age and one sex is not a town; it is a camp. And the spokesman himself describes a camp, when he boasts of guards and enclosure. But a camp without a commander, without work, without an end date: what is that but an armed lodging-house planted at the gate of another man's village?

Nor should I pass over what the reports leave unsaid. How these men were vetted, where they come from, how long they will stay, who is to provide their provisions, water, doctors and work: on all this I find nothing. An architect who, questioned about a building, says nothing of water and fields is another Dinocrates. Our ancestors did not found colonies in secret, but by passing a law, appointing three commissioners and dividing the land by survey; and the townsmen knew who was coming and under what laws they would live. Here the plan was changed and announced afterwards; so it is that the master of a house learns from the builder that his wall has been put up somewhere else.

I do not take the villagers' motion to mean that a parish can secede from a kingdom; by what law that could be done the reports do not say, nor do I believe there is any. It is, however, a plumb line: it shows that the wall is not true, even if it does not set the wall upright. I commend Bauer, too, for rejecting the county-wide vote demanded by the Reform UK-led county council, because, as he says, it would cost many thousands of pounds and would be no good use of public money; for he, as the Ephesian law required, reckoned the cost before the work. But when the villagers mark out their bounds by ballot, they are doing what we surveyors do: they are setting boundary stones that the state has neglected.

The remedy is old and not difficult. First, let no public lodging be built larger than the town to which it is attached. Next, before the foundations are laid, let the townsfolk be consulted, the number published openly, and the land, water, roads and guard properly reckoned. Lastly, let the magistrate who chooses the site inscribe his name on the work and render account if the number or the cost runs over. For a place that cannot nourish a man preserves neither the stranger nor the citizen.