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Welcome to the Conversation
Welcome to our latest Q&A with a Guardian journalist. Political columnist Rafael Behr is online now answering your questions.
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Key events
What will a post-truth world look like?
911IsAJoke asks: If it were to ever materialise, how will the post “post -truth” world look?
Raf: I don’t have a good answer to this one but I’m pretty sure it comes about through a serious reckoning with AI models and how they process the idea of “truth”.
The whole post-truth discourse in recent years has largely been a function of fragmentation in the information space caused by social media. To my mind (and I’m far from the only person to see it like this) it is a transformation in the foundations of what we judge to be an authority, with the old hierarchies – the gatekeepers and arbitrators of fact – being pulled down, analogous to the upheavals of the European Reformation. It isn’t comfortable for journalists, academics, mainstream politicians to see themselves cast in the role of the old Papal hierarchy and monasteries with a bunch of digital anabaptists burning everything around them. The analogy is flawed in all sorts of ways, but as a rough guide to the likely scale and duration of turmoil, it’s quite instructive. Worth noting, though, that the counter-Reformation was surprisingly successful but that’s a whole historiographical minefield I won’t blunder into.
The key point is that new institutions and new mechanisms for establishing trust will eventually come into being, maybe on the foundations of old ones, maybe as innovations using the very technologies that seem to have undermined the foundations of epistemological security in the first place. I recommend Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge on this subject. Also, I found this Substack essay by Dan Williams, a Cambridge philosopher, really interesting on what AI will do.
A counter-intuitive and often persuasive view making the case that LLMs, far from accelerating the fragmentation and dissolution of information into post-truth mush, actually represent the pendulum swinging back the other way.
Why is the government still on X?
nickwayne asks: Should the government set an example by leaving X? It amplifies the poison left by Brexit.
Raf: Yes. I find it a bit mystifying that this hasn’t happened yet. There is an argument that you need to keep a presence there in order to bring some semblance of balance – that you need the “good” information in the ecosystem to stop it all being overrun by the “bad” stuff. But when the algorithm belongs to a man like Elon Musk, who has for years promoted anti-immigrant and far-right content in his own posts, it seems pretty futile to think anything like fair balance can be achieved. But this is part of a wider dysfunction in the way digital discourse is debated in UK politics. There is a misconstrual of the whole thing as a question of “free speech”. That isn’t an irrelevant consideration. We have to be careful about regulating information flows. But what is happening now is the capture of the entire information ecosystem by platforms and people who have extreme ideological agendas, actively try to subvert UK politics and aren’t citizens of the UK. It is a matter of control of the basic infrastructure that allows politics to function effectively. When people are poisoning the wells from which we need to draw essential water to irrigate democracy it is no longer a simple “free speech” issue.
Is the Norway option still possible?
MrGluben asks: Is the compromise of rejoining the single market via membership of the EFTA (and by extension the EEA), the so-called Norway option, still a possibility?
Raf: Absolutely, at least from a technical point of view. And the Lib Dems recently made this their policy precisely in the hope of putting pressure on a new (Burnham, presumably) government to move in that direction. In some respects the EEA/EFTA idea is easier because it’s an off-the shelf model and would give Brussels a clearer sense of the destination the UK has in mind, making the negotiations easier to structure. The problems are, of course, political. The big one is freedom of movement, which is a non-negotiable part of SM membership. When I asked Ed Davey’s office about this, I was told he thinks it’s a winnable argument: that the British public are so down on Brexit, so aware that it has gone wrong, and mindful that leaving th EU hardly dealt the immigration issue anyway, that freedom of movement could be sold as a reciprocal benefit and that the merits of a much closer relationship with our continental neighbours would facilitate better cooperation on other migration issues, chiefly the small boat crossings. There is some polling evidence to support that optimistic view. The European Council for Foreign Relations has a new poll out that suggests freedom of movement, if advertised as part of a package of general trade and economic integration, is acceptable to a majority of people by a surprising margin.
There is another problem with EEA/Norway etc, which is the old “soft Brexit” issue of rule-taking. As members of the single market but not full members of the EU, the UK would end up aligning with regulations over which it has very little say or agency. This is one of the bitterest ironies of Brexit. The eurosceptic myth of Brussels “dictating” laws to parliament never took account of the power that British ministers had on the European council, often with veto powers. “Europe” was not something “they” did to “us” but something we did to and for ourselves. But once we left, the threat of taking dictation became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our interests demand closeness to the single market but proximity without a voice really is a loss of sovereignty. Maybe worth it, but not great. That’s the logic that dragged us towards ever harder iterations of Brexit, leading to the deal we now have, which turns out to be disastrous.
So the bottom line – one that was clear enough back in 2016 to those who thought it through – is that the logic of a soft Brexit tends inevitably to the view that the softer the Brexit, the better it is for Britain; and so the best kind of Brexit is no Brexit at all!
Could the UK rejoin the EU without another referendum?
nivlek47 asks: Our media, especially the print media, is the same as it was 10 years ago. Even if there was another referendum in 10 years, we will still have the same media who were for Brexit be against rejoining, and the same old bendy bananas “arguments”. Wouldn’t it be better to have re-entry as a manifesto pledge and just do it, rather than risk another generational referendum?
Raf: I think it would be hard to enact anything as significant as rejoining the EU without a referendum and, for the reasons you say, there would have to be a very clear and solid majority in favour before even embarking on a campaign. But that would be a condition of starting the negotiations with Brussels anyway. The EU is not going to be interested in a serious process to hammer out terms of UK membership 2.0 if it looks like a knife-edge issue in domestic politics. European leaders were burned enough by the first referendum and by the spectacle of Donald Trump coming back after four years of Joe Biden. So, in a way, the question of whether or not to have a referendum is barely relevant. If you have completely won the key political arguments in favour of Britain being part of the European project again and its not even controversial any more, you can have the vote, and if you haven’t made that kind of progress, you won’t be in a position to try your luck with a plebiscite.
But I do think there is path that involves a party winning a general election with a pledge to open talks on joining the EU and that election victory being used as the lever to really shift the dial in public debate. As with so many of these scenarios, a really talented communicator as leader and media strategy fit for the fragmented, polarised digital climate are key.
Welcome to the Conversation
Welcome to our latest Q&A with a Guardian journalist. Political columnist Rafael Behr is online now answering your questions.
Sign up here to join the discussion and post your questions
