Having substantially reduced my Twitter activity of late, on return today I am really struck by the gap between the the official channels of political discourse and what we find here. Downside of Twitter is that its all here from the brilliant to the banal, expert to the crank /1

Its the baggage carousel of ideas constantly revolving with unmediated new additions of content and overly eager users waiting to grab the latest addition to make their own. But its all out there and in that sense its a form of democratic engagement /2

There have been some outstanding bits of health reporting and Fergus Walsh in particular has been astonishingly good. But the amount of "human interest" filler in programming is just crowding out much of the debate both on Brexit and on coronavirus. /3

So as we worry about the health of the country and the economic implications of all of this, we need to be asking harder questions about the state of democracy in the UK and how we talk about and make decisions about the issues the UK faces. This isn't a call for navel gazing /4

Democracy isn't what happens episodically at elections. Its about how you govern by consent. Consent must be continually supplied as decisions are made. We don't seem to be learning real democratic lessons from the Brexit fiasco by engaging all nations of UK and civil society /5

So PM's statement today about opening up the conversation on the pandemic is welcome but it needs to have a shape and mediating processes. And we cannot have an open conversation about Covid while having a closed mind about Brexit END/