The Brexit Blog: Decision time

despite this being an election defined by Brexit, there is no substantive discussion of Brexit...Labour have failed to fill out what their ‘sensible Brexit’ would look like... the Conservatives have said little beyond their ‘get Brexit done’ slogan...

the real and difficult choices ... Johnson would immediately face over Brexit... from one of the central contradictions of Brexit. Sold to voters by a largely nationalist and protectionist campaign, it was immediately re-described ... as an endorsement of globalism ... strategic incoherence ... In a world characterised by ... regulatory super blocs (US, EU and, arguably, China) there is no space for a country viably to ‘go it alone’... By leaving the EU, Britain will have less rather than more control...

These complex strategic realities and trade-offs that Brexit entails are precisely what should have been discussed... [instead] ... flowering of post-truth politics... the truth does not matter, or ... there is no truth to be told and no way of telling what the truth is anyway... ‘fake news’ is defended on the basis that the accusation is itself fake news... who’s to say that your belief is better than my belief – except an elitist?...

where facts are not disputed they do not generally form part of normal politics... a contestation over securing widespread acceptance of facts and designing policy accordingly... only works if there is some shared commitment to evidence, logic, and rules of argument. It’s this which is under attack in post-truth politics