Guest: Tim Newark is a political commentator in the UK.
With British MPs poised to vote on Brexit next week—the deal to finally leave the EU—British TV screened a film that showed exactly why Brexiteers are so fed up with the Establishment’s patronising view of their campaign for freedom from foreign rule.
It’s all about “taking back control.”
History is written by winners, goes the quote often attributed to Winston Churchill, but in this case the story of Brexit has been dramatized by the losers in a new TV movie, “Brexit: the Uncivil War”— and it shows.
Watch the trailer here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U9PtoH5bsM
Remainer film and TV star Benedict Cumberbatch says 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 who orchestrated the winning referendum vote to LEAVE.
“Cummings is honest,” says 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 and full Brexit this March.
That is the revolution we voted for and have yet to see after two and a 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 anti-Establishment 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 Aaron Banks are portrayed as vulgar clowns, while Boris Johnson is a bumbling fool.
I remember at the time of the referendum 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 Bank’s well-funded Leave.EU that did much of the heavy lifting work and provided the grassroots army that motivated so many fed-up people to believe their vote could actually make a difference.
In my view, Farage in particular should be regarded as the great patriotic hero he is 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 Prime Minister David Cameron to promise a referendum in 2015.
Without Farage we wouldn’t even be talking about Brexit.
I would like to see a drama that gives Farage full credit for correctly understanding the gut-instinct, anti-Establishment sentiment that delivered the political earthquake of 2016.
But that’s never going to happen in a media dominated by left-wing (BBC) 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 believe 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 fake 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.
*(This article is an edited version of a comment feature appearing in the Sunday Express)
