Brexit: The Uncivil War

What Remainers never understood.

Something has always bothered me about Brexit.

Not the political phenomenon (though I hear that has irked some people tremendously) but the television film starring Benedict Cumblebum.

I recently rewatched Brexit: The Uncivil War for the third or fourth time. It is still quite good, though the ‘troubled genius’ portrayal of Dominic Cummings now seems somewhat absurd in the light of, well, everything.

Mr Cummings may well be troubled, and is certainly a clever chap, but post ‘eye test gate’ he has lost some of his savant-like mystique.

But that wasn’t what annoyed me. What continues to get my goat every time I watch it is one particular scene, towards the end of the film.

The leader of the Remain campaign, Craig Oliver (played by Rory Kinnear) witnesses a focus group—eventually entering the room himself in sheer frustration—wherein a middle-aged woman loses her composure and starts ranting desperately: ‘I’m sick of feeling like nothing…like I have nothing, like I know nothing, like I am nothing, I’m sick of it!’

Even though the film portrays her as slightly hysterical and unappealing, there is also something moving in her words, something true.

And indeed one feels the writer probably intended all of that.

Where it all goes wrong is the very next scene. Craig Oliver, having witnessed the impassioned rant, has a moment of revelation.

He realises that those on the Leave side have already got to this woman and everyone like her long ago, and that the Remain campaign is effectively over.

‘I hadn’t realised. And now it’s too late. Their campaign began twenty years ago…more. The slow drip, drip, drip of fear and hate without anyone willing to counter it. Worse, we stuck the boot in too. How many of us on this side blamed Europe or the outsider when it was politically convenient to do so? And now…now we’re expected in a matter of weeks to begin pushing back that tide.’ 

The problem is, it is the wrong revelation.

What he should have seen in that moment is that the Remainers had neglected a large section of the population whose valid concerns they never cared to understand.

Instead, his stunned reflection focuses solely on the failure to get their messaging across to these people. It is a lamentation over Vote Leave’s superior propaganda, along with the odd idea that the proto-Remainers also partly fuelled this ‘hate’.

In other words, Leave voters have no valid concerns about sovereignty, democracy, or their communities being radically changed by mass immigration. They are just nasty racists, encouraged by Cummings’ fancy ad campaign, and a few remnants of past political expediency from the Remain side.

I believe this scene reveals not a clever characterisation by the writer, but a blindspot. One does not get the feeling this is a subtle comment on the Craig Oliver character, in the way that for example Cumberbatch’s Cummings is seen to be using Nigel Farage in order to promote the less savoury aspects of the Leave campaign, without getting his own hands dirty.

No, here we sense the film is simply showing us what its creators perceive to be the truth. And while it may well be true that those who wanted to leave the EU had been laying the groundwork for many years, the scene suggests this is little more than a trick. The enemy has outsmarted us, nothing more.

Thus, the opportunity for a genuinely objective drama is lost.

One’s suspicions are confirmed by the absurdly biased text that appears at the very end of the film. We are warned darkly, over a tense minor chord soundtrack, about the usual Remainer hobby horses of Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer, and of course Donald Trump (because why not?). It also reveals that the filmmakers consulted, perhaps tellingly, with Craig Oliver himself.

It is a pity, as the film could have been an excellent document of this historic moment that continues to divide us.

I could have looked past the silly portrayal of Nigel Farage, and the way the film ridicules him while presenting Cummings as the lone (evil?) genius behind Brexit.

But I cannot accept the Remain bias that the film (which after all was first shown on Channel 4) can’t quite bring itself to dispense with.

It all feels a bit like when your Remainer relative is making valid points about the economy, then suddenly says something like ‘Jacob Rees-Mogg will end up in jail!’.

Immediately they betray the deluded hysteria of someone with ‘#FBPE’ in their Twitter bio, and all reason is lost.

I wouldn’t go on about all of this—after all it is just a three year old television movie— but the recent Remainer coup in our Conservative Party shows that we are far from done with Brexit.

And unless both sides can be honest about their failings, we probably never will be.