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Standing in the street shouting virulent slogans or chanting loaded refrains about Islam was the mainstay of British far-right groups such as the EDL in the early 2010s. Now, that behaviour feels almost quaint. Recent weeks have seen major anti-immigration blockades in Dover led by balaclava-wearing men, and direct action against asylum seekers arriving on a small boat in Portsmouth.
Clearly, in 2026, the blame for much of the societal rot that has set in has been placed frequently at the feet of migrants, and vigilante tactics are on the rise. Channel 4’s one-off documentary arrives with depressing timeliness, then, telling a story that serves as a synecdoche for events playing out across the UK, at large. It is, says its maker, “the story of a community on the frontline of Britain’s broken asylum system, and one man’s journey into the heart of the far-right movement”.
Film-maker Jamie Roberts – whose previous documentaries include Angry, White and Proud and Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods – has form in finding people whose personal stories speak to a wider malaise, and letting them recount those stories in their own words. We aren’t told whether or not utilities manager turned anti-immigration activist Liam Tomsett is in the wrong for the way he behaves in his Sussex town of Crowborough, where he blocks contractors from making deliveries to an asylum centre. But it would be a stretch to say that Tomsett comes out of the programme looking overly reasonable – not least when he finds himself in an altercation with some of the contractors at the site, and is arrested and charged with common assault and possession of an offensive weapon. (For Tomsett, it is about “keeping your community safe”, while he says the hammer found in his car was for DIY.) The charges are later dropped.
In Crowborough – once a sleepy market town known for its associations with Arthur Conan Doyle and Winnie-the-Pooh – we learn how an asylum accommodation centre at a disused army camp has become the centre of local tensions. Green councillor (and the party’s deputy leader) Rachel Millward is abused and heckled by her constituents at a council meeting, where one woman asks: “I’d like to know how she’d feel if it was her being raped – would she be OK with them coming here then?” Tomsett is among those who shout down Millward. He then follows her as she walks to her car, calling her “a disgrace” and taunting her as she cries. Elsewhere, he asks local counter-protesters how they feel about having asylum seekers they don’t know living so close by, prompting a 10/10 response from one of the women: “We don’t know you, apart from the fact that you’re out on bail …”
If it wasn’t so horrific, parts of England ’Til I Die could almost feel like something written by Chris Morris. One woman launches into an extended rant about burqas, halal meat and dogs, while three men from the asylum centre whom Tomsett and a group of other men follow down the road turn out to be Iranian Christians on their way to church. Tomsett and his Crowborough Says No collaborator Gary believe that their actions are “a fuck-you to the government”. But it seems the people they’re truly hurting are their own neighbours; as one anonymous contributor says, it’s a “really horrible feeling” knowing that people in the town are protesting against others that look like her. Unsettling aerial camera work only emphasises the sense that Crowborough is becoming something of a strange and unknowable place, just not in the way that Tomsett claims.
While much of this programme is highly upsetting to watch, Roberts leaves room for nuance – be it about the father Tomsett is yet to grieve, the adult children whose lives he has been absent from, or the online radicalisation he has ostensibly undergone (“mainstream won’t touch it”, he says, scrolling through rightwing content online). Roberts also knows just when to chime in with a killer question: when Tomsett threatens a local business, he asks, “Do you not stop for a moment [and think] that maybe they see you as the dangerous one …?” It’s an incredibly tough topic, but one that Roberts handles with care. It feels particularly crucial, following his last project, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which was mired in controversy around its child narrator’s family, and led to an internal BBC review (in a recent Guardian interview, Roberts said that his company, Hoyo Films, had tightened its editorial procedures).
Five months after the council meeting, Millward reflects on the “slightly out-of-body experience” of being shouted down by her constituents. She doesn’t think the asylum centre plan was a good one, nor does she agree with the furtive way it seems to have been organised by central government. But she appears to have been shaken by the reaction in Crowborough, and the division “that feels like it gets deeper and deeper all the time”. Clearly, there are some serious problems to contend with in Britain today, and a working class that has been sorely let down by austerity politics. But it’s hard to come away from England ’Til I Die without the feeling that people like Tomsett are making things so much worse.
