Brexit is a culture war with economics as collateral damage

Securing any EU trade deal and regional development in the UK are steep challenges

Chris Johns

Brexit’s economic consequences won’t matter. The first order of business is banishment from the headlines. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

Brexit’s economic consequences won’t matter. The first order of business is banishment from the headlines. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

My first post-Brexit column. A business column focused on economics, with a smattering of finance. Topics that seem quaint, perhaps beside the point. The UK’s departure from the EU is the outcome of a cultural – tribal – battle where victory was total. Despite rhetoric about healing, coming together and closure, there were no efforts to reach out to the defeated. Division remains as deep as it is wide.

The culture war is metastatic. The BBC is doomed. What happens next will be regrettable, but the BBC itself is partly to blame. Its flagship programmes pushed “false equivalence” to an absurdity while facilitating the extremism that the balance was supposed to avoid. BBC Question Time long ago became a game show. It’s modern incarnation provides perverted voyeurism for those who like to watch intellectually challenged people yelling half-formed prejudices at each other. Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh missed a trick.

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