We Leavers aren’t stupid... whatever TV’s elite believe
HISTORY is written by winners, goes the quote often attributed to Winston Churchill but, in this case, the story of Brexit is being dramatised by the losers in tomorrow night’s Channel 4 TV movie, Brexit: The Uncivil War – and it shows.
Remainer film and TV star Benedict Cumberbatch says that we’ll be surprised at how balanced it really is but then says with faux sympathy how sad he is that Leave voters will be disappointed by Brexit when it happens. Cumberbatch plays the Brexit campaign mastermind Dominic Cummings.
“Cummings is honest,” said the Sherlock star in a recent interview. “He tried to cause a revolution and hoped something would fill the void – but it hasn’t. What really upsets me is that the people who wanted change to affect their lives in a positive way are going to be cheated yet again...”
Oh, poor us. Leave voters are characterised yet again as too stupid to fully understand the 2016 campaign and doomed to be disappointed by their unrealistic expectations.
In reality, the only way we’re going to be cheated is if we don’t get a proper Brexit in March. That is the revolution we voted for and have yet to see after two-anda-half years of wasted so-called negotiations with Brussels.
The film’s author, James Graham, is also a Remainer but lives in the strongly Leave-voting area of Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, which went from Labour to Conservative in 2017. To give him his due, he does portray Cummings as gaining an advantage over his Remain rivals by actually listening to the views of voters. When he visits a deprived Essex coastal town, he is shown putting his ear to the ground, saying, “The noise is getting louder. What does it mean?” It is the sound of antiEstablishment anger finally given a voice in the referendum.
But like all Remainers who believe they are cleverer than Leave-voters, Graham depicts Cummings as a Machiavellian figure who uses his intelligence to swing the vote. In contrast, Nigel Farage and Arron Banks are portrayed as vulgar clowns, while Boris Johnson is a bumbling fool.
I remember at the time being aghast at how Cummings and the Vote Leave Westminster-bubble group equally disrespected Farage and Banks and elbowed them out of being the official campaign. And yet it was Farage’s four million Ukip voters and Banks’s well-funded Leave.EU that did much of the heavy lifting work and provided the grassroots army that motivated so many fedup people to believe their vote could actually make a difference.
Farage, in particular, should be regarded as a patriotic hero for persistently making the case for leaving the EU over two decades. It was only the increasingly successful performance of Ukip at a succession of elections that forced then-prime minister David Cameron to promise a referendum in 2015. Without Farage we wouldn’t even be talking about Brexit.
I’d like to see a drama that gives Farage full credit for correctly understanding the gut-instinct, antiEstablishment sentiment that delivered the political earthquake of 2016. But that’s never going to happen in a media dominated by left-wing creatives who revile him. When I tried to get my book Protest Vote published in 2014, not one major publisher was interested in it and yet it proved prophetic of subsequent events.
Remainers like Graham and Cumberbatch prefer to think it could only really be clever, shadowy figures like Cummings who could win Brexit, thus continuing to fuel the idea that Leave-voters were tricked by political guile, data manipulation and spiked social media. It is the same attitude taken by left-wing intellectuals in the US with their never-ending quest to discredit Donald Trump’s 2016 victory by blaming it on Russian collusion.
When will they ever comprehend that all political parties are actually out of step with a majority of voters and we need a new maverick leader, outside of the Establishment, to put our nation back on course.
It is true that Cummings and his campaign colleague Matthew Elliott effectively sharpened the Leave argument with their “take back control” slogan. Chatting recently to Elliott he also made it clear that it was helped by simplifying the message to key figures such as the pledge to fund the NHS with £350million of EU money plastered on the side of campaign buses. It was a method he had honed during his victorious NOtoAV campaign and at the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA), which he founded.
Interestingly they first met when the TPA moved into a London office building shared with Cummings’s New Frontiers Foundation, which helped win the North East Says No regional referendum back in 2004.
BOTH are undoubtedly smart campaigners who put the Leave project on a professional footing but to put them at the centre of the referendum win in the Channel 4 film does great disservice to other key players. It only confirms the Remainers’ view that the result was a conspiracy foisted on hapless voters by a disruptive cabal. It further justifies the desperate demand for a second referendum.
When will Remainers finally accept that the biggest referendum turnout in UK political history was largely down to decent, concerned people of all ages and backgrounds seizing the opportunity to send a message of dissatisfaction to the political classes?
We didn’t need any clever people manipulating us to do that. We just walked out one June day and put a cross where it was needed. Thank God for democracy – and let’s hope our MPs deliver on that demand sooner rather than later.
‘Remainers prefer to think only shadowy figures could win Brexit’