It is because of the cookie banner. It makes the rest of the page grayer to highlight the banner. Once you close it, it is black on light-gray, which is actually the most palatable combination for me (reasonable contrast between text and background).

Yet another reason why cookie banners suck. I'd say this site's cookie banner is less sucky than others, actually.

> Yet another reason why cookie banners suck.

More like yet another reason why that government wanting to track its citizens via Google analytics sucks.

I get you and mostly agree, but using GA on its gov.uk websites is probably the least intrusive surveillance the UK does. GCHQ were pretty heavily involved in those Snowden leaks, and I don’t imagine they’ve backed off at all since then.

> I'd say this site's cookie banner is less sucky than others, actually.

So a cookie banner which makes the entire page unreadable without showing, you know, a cookie banner is less sucky than others?

I had no idea there was a cookie banner. Was the unreadable text supposed to give it away? Most cookie banners show some text which lets me approve or reject cookies.

For me it's black text on white background, in one narrow easy to read column of text.

it's almost black (#0b0c0c) on almost white (#f3f2f1), you can this by inspecting the CSS