Braverland

A Dystopian Drama for a Gaslit Nation

Every writer has failures and projects that don’t make the cut, and most of the time we just have to take it on the chin and move on. But I can’t resist sharing with you my rejected series Braverland, which I have submitted to numerous television companies, and also to Netflix, to universally negative responses. Of course, I knew that this was a risky project; even in a country locked into what even seems to be a permanent state of manufactured political melodramas, there’s not much appetite for dystopian state-of-the-nation political drama with a satirical edge.

But sometimes you just have to do what you have do. And I thought I had a pretty good spec script for a pilot episode which I called ‘Remembrance Day’. My aim was to build the series around one central character - a politically unscrupulous conservative politician with sociopathic tendencies and no moral compass beyond their own narcissism and ambition.

Yes I know you’re thinking Alan B’stard all over again, but wait. Because my protagonist is female, and she has made her career by pandering to the most extreme right wing elements of a decayed and hollowed-out party in the hope that this will give her the power and importance she’s always craved.

She’s a kind of British Trump; prepared to say anything, no matter how divisive, dangerous, ignorant, dishonest or inflammatory in order to advance herself, in the name of what she calls ‘the silent majority.’ I called my character ‘Suella Braverman’, and - extra twist - she’s the daughter of immigrants! And she also happens to be a Home Secretary notorious for her cruelty towards ‘illegal immigrants’ - a neat premise on my part, I thought.

I gave my character some pungent backstory: She’s a member of the Brexit extremist European Research Group. A former Attorney General. She’s herself photographed laughing outside a migrant detention centre in Rwanda. She says that homelessness is a ‘lifestyle choice.’ She calls pro-Palestinian protestors calling for a ceasefire ‘hate marchers.’ She says that Pakistani men ‘hold cultural values at odds with British values’ - it’s edgy, I know.

That was the basis of my first rejection - from a reader who refused to read the rest because, according to him, no one like this could ever occupy such a crucial and famously difficult office of state in a country like ours. Even dystopian satires, I was told, have to have some connection to real possibilities. And that was before I really got into my stride.

My scenario unfolds at a tense time in our national history. The Gaza war has opened deep divisions within society, inflaming tensions to the point when Jews and Muslims are feeling vulnerable and under threat. For weeks, tens of thousands of people have been marching in protest at the shocking devastation in Gaza and calling for a ceasefire. Now the organizers of the ceasefire movement call for another protest on Armistice Day.

Times like these that require wise and thoughtful statesmen and stateswomen, who know to chose their words carefully. But in my plot we have a Conservative party and a rightwing media that always seeks to make a bad thing worse. And so its members and supporters immediately seize on the protest, accusing its organisers of ‘disrespecting’ our war dead, and preparing to attack and deface the Cenotaph. There are calls for the police to cancel the march, because of ‘rising fears of violence’ - even though there is no evidence that that the marchers are planning any violence, or even intend to go anywhere near the Cenotaph.

Naturally the Daily Mail leads the charge:

In the same issue, a columnist called ‘Sarah Vine’ delivers a remarkably condescending message to the ‘ignorant snowflakes’ of her children’s generation, to ‘Educate yourselves. Stop scrolling. Read a history book. And, above all, keep your hands off our heroes this Remembrance weekend.’

Waiting for the Barbarians

In the midst of this, my Braverman character writes an incendiary piece in the Times attacking the ceasefire marchers once again, in which she accuses the police of favouring BLM protesters over ‘lockdown protesters’ and pandering to the Gaza ceasefire protest marchers. Not for the first time, my character calls them ‘hate marchers’, who she compares to ‘the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland.’

What’s this? one smartass producer asked me. A Conservative Home Secretary on the extreme right of the party attacking the Orangemen? Never going to happen.

Fine. My bad, so I suggested that she was actually referring to ‘dissident republicans.’ And when was the last time dissident republicans marched with the approval of the police? the producer asked (why are these metropolitan elitists sooo picky?).

I defended my character as follows: We’re in a near-future dystopia. My Home Secretary is basically calling the police ‘woke’. She is suggesting that extreme-right protesters receive preferential treatment in comparison with the left - a well-worn rightwing victimhood trope. She is attempting to undermine the Metropolitan police chief ‘Mark Rowley’, who refuses to bow to political pressure and ban the Gaza march - even the Prime Minister, who I call ‘Rishi Sunak’ has suggested that such a march on Armistice Day would be ‘disrespectful.’

Well everyone knows how famously leftwing the Met are. So I had what I thought were some striking and well-written scenes here, and I wasn’t pleased to be told in no uncertain terms that none of this could never happen. No one accepted my big reveal, in which it turns out that ‘Braverman’ had submitted her article for prime ministerial approval only to be told to make some changes. But she then published it anyway, without including the suggestions from 10 Downing Street - a slap in the face and a ‘sack me if you dare’ challenge for ‘Rishi Sunak’.

Anyone who did this would be SACKED, I was told - all right, no need for the capitals, ok? I get it. But in my scenario, she isn’t, because the PM simply doesn’t dare - or so it seems.

And ‘Suella Braverman’ isn’t the only one looking to defend ‘our heroes’ from the Gaza hate marchers. On Twitter, an Israeli propagandist called ‘Douglas Murray’ rages against the ‘UK Hamas supporters’ planning ‘a "million man march" on Remembrance Day’. On the basis of no evidence whatsoever, Murray warns that the protesters ‘plan to defame our war-dead and desecrate the Cenotaph itself.’ This, he says, must surely be the ‘ tipping point,’ and ‘if such a march goes ahead then the people of Britain must come out and stop these barbarians.’

Strong words, from a humane and humble man who embodies the finest achievements of our civilisation - or is it race? And there is no shortage of patriots willing to heed these calls. The Democratic Football Lads Alliance promises to prevent protesters from trying to ‘desecrate and disrespect our monuments’ and act as a ‘buffer’, so that veterans and patriots can pay their respects at the Cenotaph. Others call for ‘resistance’ on behalf of the ‘silent majority’, in order to prevent the desecration of their ‘sacred day.’

Who would possibly think that calling for a ceasefire constitutes a ‘desecration’? asked one of my readers. Wasn’t I in danger of overdoing it? Honestly, do you have to explain to these people that dystopia means ‘bad place’, even the ‘worst possible place’? Haven’t they seen The Hunger Games? Elsewhere, a character I call ‘Tommy Robinson’ aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as CokeBoy Dim - newly-restored to Twitter thanks to the benign stewardship of Elon Musk - issues a video, calling on ‘ British men’ to come to London to ‘show our Government and show our police and show Hamas and everyone sitting around the world saying “Britain has fallen” that there is a resistance."

It’s stirring stuff, enough to bring a lump to the throat of anyone who’s seen Frozen. But sometimes a picture is worth a thousand patriotic words, and throughout the week leading up to Remembrance Weekend, a procession of goofy-looking Tory MPs posed for what looks like a series of stills from a Gardener’s Question Time episode on how to grow artificial poppies using your own bullshit as fertiliser.

Of course some of my readers reminded me that we are a serious country, and said that such behaviour is too patently fake and mawkish to be credible, and that no Tory politician would sink so low as to use our war dead to boost their own profile. To which I can only repeat: this is dys-top-ia. It’s sat-ire.

Anyway, whatever you think of that premise, there is no doubt that the barbarian hate marchers are coming to trample on our war dead and perhaps boil their bones into soup. Never mind that a former British general, an admiral, and the British legion all insist that the march should go ahead. The right knows what it knows, and is not interested in anything else, so much so that even ‘Rishi Sunak’ warns ‘Mark Rowley’ that he will hold him ‘accountable’ - something he has singularly failed to do with ‘Suella Braverman’ - if the protest kicks off.

All week it goes on like this: the right works itself into a fit of frothing righteous indignation and civilisation terror at the coming sacrilege; the ghosts of the Somme rise up from the green fields of France; Churchill’s bust frowns, and a sigh is heard from from the statue of the unknown soldier. There are dire warnings that poppy sellers have been attacked by Gaza protesters for selling poppies, to the point when no one dares sell them anymore, because this is the kind of thing that barbarians (aka Muslims) do.

Never mind that the woke British Transport Police and woke police and the woke British legion deny that such attacks have taken place and insist that poppies are being sold as normal. As Nadine Dorries would say, they would, wouldn’t they? This is why ‘Rishi Sunak’ declares himself ‘appalled’ that poppy sellers, including ‘many veterans who are the heart of our collective remembrance each year’ have experienced ‘intimidation and abuse’ - even though they haven’t.

Once again, I’m told by one metropolitan gatekeepers - with the capitals again - that nothing like this could ever EVER happen. Anyway, in my pilot, the day finally dawns - Armistice Day - the day when we remember all those who fought to preserve our freedoms. The nation holds its breath in the autumn sunshine, anticipating the barbarian hordes who will come to tear poppies from the ground, to dig up the bones of the war dead, to paint on Churchill’s face and adorn the Cenotaph with Palestinian flags and calls for jihad.

From across the country hundreds of thousands of protesters converge on the capital - maybe between 300,000 to 800,000 - and, apart from some jostling of Michael Gove later, and a few abhorrent banners and placards - STOP using Swastika/Star of David cartoons…nothing happens. The march passes off peacefully and goes nowhere near the Cenotaph.

The protesters even hold a two-minute silence to commemorate the victims of all wars, including Gaza. But the Cenotaph does get attacked. Hundreds of far-right ‘counter-protesters’ try to ‘defend’ it, even though the Cenotaph is already being defended by police. Unwilling to put their trust in the woke pinko Met - and as Nadine Dorries would say, who can blame them? - these brave sons of the English soil attack the police.

Nine police officers are injured. Two of them end up in hospital. Nearly a hundred ‘counter-protesters’ are arrested. Pissed up mobs chant ‘England till I die’ and bray at the police ‘you’re not English anymore’ and ‘why us, not them?’ Some give Nazi salutes. The patriots have turned up and they look a lot like the barbarians we were warned about.

At some point, ‘Tommy Robinson’ abandons the scene in a taxi emblazoned with gay pride colours. This was the point where I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I had lost the plot.

So for all these reasons, my pilot was scrapped. And now, it will never be seen: my dystopian tale of a gaslit nation; of political extremism and ‘radicalization’, encouraged and emboldened by the Home Secretary, the Prime Minister, the rightwing press, and a host of dubious actors on social media; of a country in free-fall where integrity, honesty, and even the most elementary concept of public duty are absent from a government and a Tory party in a death-spiral; a moral collapse which is most brazenly-embodied in the Home Secretary.

Now I will never get to do the follow-up, in which the same people who deliberately inflamed tensions throughout the past week are now rowing back from it, or attempting to distract from what they said and from what ‘Suella Braverman’ said, about the riot they hoped for but didn’t get. You can imagine what the Mail would have said if pro-Palestinian protesters had attacked the Cenotaph and injured nine police officers. But it didn’t get that, and in my pilot, we got this:

Those episodes must also vanish, along with the tweet in which ‘Suella Braverman’ praises the police for defending the Cenotaph against the ‘counter-protesters’ she incited, which doesn’t save her from being sacked. Now you won’t see the episode in which - wait for it - a former Prime Minister named ‘David Cameron’ is brought back as Foreign Secretary.

Of course I can hear the know-it-all tv script readers say that no prime minister in his right mind would bring back a man who a parliamentary committee blamed for the failed Libya ‘intervention’, not to mention the hapless facilitator of Brexit - the worst foreign policy disaster in British history. Who, you can hear them ask, would do that, at a time when the country is waging an indirect war with Russia, and complicit in the destruction of Gaza?

No point in trying to make them suspend disbelief and accept that the same prime minister has appointed Esther McVey as (drum roll) Minister for Common Sense. Are we a joke country? You can hear them say.

So all those weeks of imaginative labour have gone down the drain. And now I’ll just have to get back to the drawing-board, and see if I can think of something more plausible, and you’ll just have to imagine what Braverland might have looked like, if we were living in dys-top-ia.