Before Brexit: The Uncivil War is allowed to drift off into the ether, there is an important point which needs to be made, and yet which has not been addressed in all the reams of comment which have written about it. There is a gaping hole in its narrative. That narrative seems straightforward enough: Vote Leave won the referendum because its leader, Dominic Cummings, and his team of geeks realised that they could tap into a vast, lost constituency of Britons with whom politicians and traditional political campaigning methods had lost touch. This they did by analysing Facebook and other social media data and then hitting the lost voters – put at three million – incessantly with micro-targeted adverts.
Maybe, but if it was this lost constituency wot won it, it certainly isn’t represented by the Leave voters depicted in the film: the old lady in the focus group who broke down when accused of racism and the trailer park couple from Jaywick (the down-at-heel end of Clacton, Douglas Carswell’s former constituency).
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