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Really?
SP is a pretty liberal affair. Global surveillance was the zeitgeisty matter of 2014-15 with the Snowden leaks in the USA and the PRISM affair in the UK. There was a general acceptance that the governments of the world were encroaching on fundamental freedoms. So the fact that Mendes made the surveillance program the centre of the film's villainous scheme - and introduced corrupt Whitehall officials to work in concert with them - was a pretty liberal notion.
SF is more conservative, as in that film Britain and the intelligence agencies are under threat and there is more dogged flag-waving. Bond is presented as a tenacious and weathered force - much like Blighty.
Do we know if Mendes was a leave or a remainer? He is an artsy Hollywood sort who did just make a play about the collapse of the Lehman banks. Seems kinda liberal. I've always been surprised by the flag-waving in SF.
We know that Craig advocated "remain".
So I have serious doubts that Craig would have allowed even the smallest hint pro-Brexit.
My guess is that Craig, Broccoli, Wilson, ... are unwilling to touch these highly sensitive topics at the moment.
True, and Fleming himself was only half-Scottish, like Bond. But the facts are that Fleming never referred to Bond as anything but English until On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the novel written after Connery was cast and which even contains an in-joke about the film of Dr. No. So Connery's casting probably inspired Fleming to ensure Bond had Scottish ancestry when he explored the topic in OHMSS. He might have already had it in mind, since Bond was a quasi-autobiographical figure. But Connery seems to have been the spur.
As for the Brexit topic, the referendum came several years after Skyfall's release, which means we're retroactively determining the film's ideology if we decide it's pro-Brexit. The simplest answer is that Skyfall partook in a nation-wide moment of patriotism that was later hijacked by the Brexit campaign. Had the film been made after 2016, it would have probably been more subtle in its patriotism. As it is, the film's UK locations are London and Scotland--two places where the remain vote was strongest.
I doubt that Bond would have been a leaver--he's a cosmopolitan more at home abroad than in Britain. He's never been particularly interested in the politics of what happens in Britain itself, though he has an old-fashioned sense of patriotism and lingering affection for the British empire. Fleming himself was a cosmopolitan who favored the idea of the British going out to conquer the world. His opinion of Brexit would be hard to gauge in light of his love-hate affair with Germany. He was perpetually afraid of German rearmament (which so far hasn't happened, but might if America goes further down the drain) but admired the Germans as "the most gifted people in Europe."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/movies/1917-sam-mendes.html
After directing the James Bond movies “Skyfall” and “Spectre,” Mendes was having trouble mounting a new film project. His agent Beth Swofford suggested that he explore the World War I stories he had once told her. In 2017, a year after the Brexit vote, Mendes found further inspiration. “I’m afraid that the winds that were blowing before the First World War are blowing again,” he said. “There was this generation of men fighting then for a free and unified Europe, which we would do well to remember.”
I didn't think SF was a 'Brexit' film, though perhaps something like 'Dunkirk' was.
I think the way the country felt in 2012 was very different in 2012. In many respects, I think if Mendes returned and got to do a Bond film in 2020, he'd have Brexit on his mind when conceiving the story.
Yes, Leavers most certainly don't have a monopoly on nationalism. I'm not sure that nationalism is a value at all, to be honest. In fact nationalism unfettered led us into two hugely destructive World Wars. The four constituent parts of the Union all pulling together in the war effort kept the foreign threat of nationalism at bay.
Even today, I see nationalism as more of a negative within the United Kingdom context, but then I'm a unionist. See the so-called civic nationalism of the SNP in Scotland and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. Both parties are staunchly for Remain and for carving up independent countries out of the existing Union. If anything their combined nationalism trumps that of the English nationalists who have no real power nor even an English legislative assembly to take seats in, were they even to win power, which is doubtful.