It occurs to me that many people - individuals, commentators, pundits, politicians - have invested so much emotional and political capital in Brexit that almost any cognitive feat of affirmation, no matter how unconnected to reality, is not only possible but highly desirable.

This is a real problem.

Whether you think Brexit is good or not it obviously has and will have some substantial issues (it is impossible for it to not).

Ignoring these issue and pretending they don’t exist (or aren’t even true) has created an enormous wave of cognitive distortion that is impairing national decision making to a profound degree.

I find this snappy definition of motivated reasoning quoted in Wikipedia.

"tendency to find arguments in favor of conclusions we want to believe to be stronger than arguments for conclusions we do not want to believe".[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

This is perhaps also relevant to some of the recent vaccine discourse, especially with respect to UK-centric perceptions of behaviour in Europe, which has resulted in some strangely strong views...

.... , from even quite sensible commentators, about subjects as diverse as comparative medical regulatory practice (loosely conflated to ‘the precautionary principle); vaccine supply logistics (roughly translated as doses in fridges); levels of vaccine scepticism...

...Whether European concerns regarding AZ are in fact some grand political conspiracy related to Brexit (aka ‘they’re all out to get us’); and, even, quite remarkably, whether European medical regulators understand statistics...

Whereas, in fact, a much more sensible view would have been to accept that there was a reasonable chance that these various regulators had discovered something significant and then wait a little to see what new information might emerge.

The UK vaccination program has been a great success on both an absolute and a relative basis. But, to state the obvious, it is not perfect (how can it be?) and other countries’ vaccination programs have been less successful (a fact).

But it would be foolish to exaggerate either the former or the latter. The gap between the European and UK vaccination programs is c six weeks. While this time is very precious it is not incontrovertible proof of the eternal success of one versus the other.

It is a hard but true fact that despite its better performance the UK vaccination program has potential flaws (this is normal). And that not treating the entire situation as some weird competition, and trying to understand the issues that may emerge might be a very good idea.