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.
