How opinion articles keep us abreast of the stories that get buried by Brexit

For all the division Brexit has fostered over the past few years, there’s one thing most of us should be able to agree on: it’s exhausting.

Talking about it is tiring, trying to wrap your head around the constantly changing developments is confusing, at best. But perhaps the most infuriating aspect of Brexit is the fact that it’s eclipsing everything else we once considered to be of the utmost importance.

In the past couple of weeks alone, developments as huge as the government’s announcement of a £200m fund to tackle Grenfell-style cladding, the UN panel’s scrutiny of the UK’s role in inflicting torture on disabled people, and the significance of the promotion of former prisons minister Rory Stewart to international development secretary could easily have slipped under our radars without the help of additional analysis and commentary.

On the Voices desk, keeping our finger on the pulse of stories and angles that could easily be lost in the fray eases the monotony of watching the government repeat the same political manoeuvres over and over again. While also covering Theresa May’s ill-fated attempt to lure Labour in on her Brexit deal last week, for example, we also made sure to comment on those three aforementioned topics, giving much-needed attention to the human interest stories that are too often left behind.

Sean O’Grady’s piece on the £200m cladding fund, for example, rightly pointed out that, despite the “bandwidth” of Brexit, it shouldn’t have taken “such a long time, and such hard lobbying by the campaigners to get the government to shift”. While Matthew Norman’s piece on Stewart’s appointment reminded us of the ongoing atrocities the prisons crisis, some of which occurred under new international development secretary’s authority. Jim Moore’s incredibly moving piece on the UK’s record on torture called attention to the varying ways in which disabled people are mistreated here – an issue that received little attention even before Brexit dominated the landscape.

Without these pieces, without these voices, we could easily lose sight of the other aspects of people’s lives that are just as, if not more, impactful as potentially leaving the EU. As long as Brexit takes centre stage, we’ll keep pieces like them coming.

Yours,

Kuba Shand-Baptiste

Voices commissioning editor