Crowborough, East Sussex is the sort of town you’re unlikely to know about, unless you live near, or within, its borders. It is a town with a population that is, per the last UK census, 95.5 per cent white, and more than 50 per cent Christian. As one Crowborough resident notes in Channel 4’s one-off documentary England ’Til I Die, it was a town “famous for Winnie the Pooh and Arthur Conan Doyle, and nothing really happened here”. She’s using the past tense because this year, Crowborough found a newer, uglier type of fame: as a hotbed of anti-immigration protests, following the government’s decision to house around 500 asylum seekers in a former army barracks there.
England ’Til I Die runs for about 50 minutes, and focuses primarily on Liam Tomsett, a utilities manager who co-leads the anti-immigration group Crowborough Says No. We watch as the town becomes increasingly fractured and combative, in footage captured during protests and public confrontations. There are also interviews with Tomsett himself, as he becomes an increasingly prominent, and increasingly radical, figure in the local movement. It is very in the moment, a story unfolding in real time. There is a lot of footage of asylum seekers being yelled at, of Crowborough residents being either tacitly or openly racist and islamophobic. This is a grim and shameful slice of modern Britain: you watch it and despair. That the doc airs a matter of days after the violence in Portsmouth, where baclava-clad far-right protesters clashed with police, underscores just how widespread the problem is.
And yet, I’m not entirely sure what England ’Til I Die wanted to achieve. Filmmaker Jamie Roberts does a pretty decent job of making the “activists” look as bad as they are — like small-minded, unreasonable thugs, using concern for the safety of women as a pretext for rank xenophobia. Tomsett is unable to really justify or articulate his stances, but says he will never be swayed from them. At one point, he discusses his belief in replacement theory, a popular white nationalist talking point, and his conviction that a secret cabal of “globallists” are trying to “replace” the white population with foreigners. Asked about their supposed motives, he simply replies: “I don’t know.”
Bar one short clip of the repellent agitator Katie Hopkins, the documentary spends basically no time exploring the factors that are driving and intensifying far-right movements like these. Tomsett, a Tottenham Hotspur fan, admits to the crossover between football lad culture anti-immigration protest groups. It is mentioned briefly that his father recently died; the role that crises of masculinity play in movements like these is left entirely for the viewer to infer. Absent too is the perspective of the asylum seekers, the voiceless victims of the story.
In effect, what we have, then, is a documentary illuminating a problem that pretty much everybody already knows exists. If England ’Til I Die is being sold as a study of a man’s descent into radicalism, then the end result is ultimately something far more banal. It is a portrait of malevolent idiocy, of empty, petty anger. It is a programme bereft of optimism, one that really does make you feel like this country is broken. That it is, of course. The question is where do we go from here?
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