Furious moment LBC presenter explodes as caller orders migrants ‘to go home’

LBC host Matthew Wright lost his temper on air during a heated clash with a Piddington resident over plans to house more than 1,200 asylum seekers near the small Oxfordshire village. Caller Jamie Perkin, a resident, told Mr Wright he did not want the proposed centre near his community.

When pressed on where the people should go instead, Mr Perkin said: “Somewhere else… in someone else’s backyard.” Mr Wright immediately labelled him a NIMBY. He said: “So you’re actually just a NIMBY. You just say: I don’t want it in my backyard. Someone else can have my problem.”

Mr Perkin pushed back, saying the Government had told residents the day before that it could not guarantee their safety. Mr Wright dismissed the concern. He said: “Can anyone guarantee anybody’s safety, sir? Jamie, can I guarantee your safety when I leave the studio today? No. No one can guarantee your safety. Let’s get realistic again.”

Mr Perkin insisted the village was not being naive. He said: “We have heard the statistics. We are not naive to think that nothing is happening. It is constantly in the news, day in, day out.” Mr Wright pressed him again on an alternative location. Mr Perkin replied: “No, I don’t want them to be here, Matt. I’m being brutally honest. They shouldn’t be here.”

Mr Wright asked: “So where should they go? We bombed their countries.” Mr Perkin said: “Back home.” That answer triggered Mr Wright’s furious response. Raising his voice, he declared: “But we bombed their countries. We can’t… They cannot go back home. We bombed Iraq.

“We promised we were going to save them in Afghanistan. We walked out and left them to the Taliban. Do you not have any sense of decency? We helped Jewish refugees in World War II. We help people who were being persecuted by the Taliban.”

Mr Perkin insisted that he did have a sense of decency and would support those with legitimate claims. He argued that many arrivals were economic migrants living off the state and that successive governments had abandoned ordinary people, leaving them to “pay the price.”

Mr Wright rejected the characterisation as opinion rather than fact.

The exchange, which has circulated widely, comes amid intense local opposition to the government’s plan to use a former Ministry of Defence site near Piddington for asylum accommodation.

The village has about 350 residents; the proposed facility would house roughly 1,250 people, more than trebling the local population.

Residents have previously voted to hold a symbolic referendum on leaving the UK in protest and are pursuing legal challenges.

Mr Wright’s outburst, particularly the line “Do you not have any sense of decency?”, has drawn strong reactions online, with critics accusing him of lecturing a resident voicing safety fears and supporters arguing he was right to challenge the “not in my backyard” stance.

The confrontation lays bare the deepening divide between those who see rural communities as unfairly bearing the practical consequences of national asylum policy and those who view local resistance as a failure of collective responsibility after years of foreign interventions and successive governments’ inability to control the system.