THOSE WACKY BRITS WITH THEIR ELECTION AND SUCH

The United Kingdom general election has come and gone, and what can be learned from it? The answer, for most people, is "what you already believed and are seeking to confirm," which is usually the answer for most things when it comes from learning about politics. But really, what can we learn from it?

Well, more accurate are the things we can accurately say we cannot learn from it. We cannot say, for example, that Labour lost so badly because they failed to support Brexit, because a slim majority of voters voted for parties that were either explicitly pro-Remain or parties who at least supported having a second referendum (which was essentially being pro-Remain, just in a wimpier way). This one is pretty straightforward. If 52 percent of voters voted for Remain parties, the problem wasn't a lack of pro-Remain sentiment, so anybody telling you that Jeremy Corbyn's ideal of a left-wing Brexit was what the party really needed to win is more or less full of it. (It's also a terrible idea, so there's that.)

We also can't say that Labour moved too far left and that was the reason for the loss - which is, to be sure, a highly popular theory with the centrist Democrats running for President, who jumped on this loss faster than vultures saying "wait, is that carrion over there?" - because there was a centrist party that people could have voted for, namely the Liberal Democrats. And the Liberal Democrats mostly got slammed too: they picked up some voteshare, mostly from Labour, but they in fact lost a bunch of seats they previously held to Conservatives, several of which were seats that were former Labour and Conservative MPs who had jumped to the Lib Dems during the Amazing Mess That Has Been The Last Couple of Years. So there was not, in fact, a massive appetite for centrist political parties here, and in fact the big swing in this election was Labour losing seats to the Tories.

What should be noted is that of the 50 seats Labour lost to the Tories, many were in fact squeaker races decided by one or two percentage points' worth of votes, and of those many were races where other parties served as spoilers, because that's how first-past-the-post parliamentary elections work (as we all know), which is why the Conservatives can now claim they won a landslide victory with 43 percent of the vote.

Looking at a post-election map, the results are a lot less surprising. Labour is islands of red in the major cities of England and Wales: London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Cardiff, Sheffield, Newcastle and Bristol, with much smaller islands in smaller urban centers like Nottingham, Leicester and Brighton. Mostly everywhere else in England is Conservative, with a double handful of Labour and Lib Dem seats scattered about here and there, almost entirely in constituencies with an urban base, and then you've got Plaid Cymru picking up a large chunk of Wales, the Scottish National Party picking up most of Scotland and Northern Ireland mostly being divided between the conservative Democratic Unionists and the Irish nationalist parties (the SDLP and Sinn Féin), with the nationalists having pulled ahead by one seat over the Unionists.

I say that all of this is "less surprising" because this is the same pattern that's happening literally everywhere in the first world these days: the conservative parties have their base in rural (or at least suburban) areas, and the liberal-left parties are mostly in cities, so elections come down to "can one of the two major parties maintain its power base and expand outside of it just a little?" And in this case, it was the Tories that did that.

And why? Honestly: Jeremy Corbyn is not a popular politician. Again and again, both during the campaign and before it, it was quite clear that Corbyn was widely disliked by the British public. A lot of lefties have been complaining about the conservative-leaning (to say the least) British media constantly attacking Corbyn, but lefty politicians get attacked by conservative media in just about every country, and the mark of a talented lefty pol is being able to get past that and tell people the story you want them talking about. Jagmeet Singh probably would have managed it if the Canadian campaign season had been a bit longer, but now his approval rating is sky-high. Bernie Sanders is also very good at it; Barack Obama was a master. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was uniquely not good at it. Jeremy Corbyn is also not good at it, and worse, nobody he trusts within the Labour Party is either, to the point where TV interviewers were literally asking Labour candidates if they wanted to "nationalize sausages." And the thing is: all of this was pretty obvious, considering that Corbyn already lost one election to a thoroughly incompetent Tory back in 2017 when he couldn't beat Theresa May. Now Corbyn has lost to May and Boris Johnson and looks worse than ever, which is why he quickly announced his resignation from the leadership.

So now what? Probably a fairly swift Brexit, becaue Johnson has put everything on Brexit and seems entirely comfortable with a no-deal Brexit, which would be a terrible option for Britain but there you go. Brexit would probably mean that the SNP would demand a Scottish independence referendum, since their "remain British" result in the last referendum was pretty explicitly predicated on the reasoning that leaving the UK also meant leaving the EU, which they definitely did not want. Northern Ireland isn't going to unify with Ireland tomorrow or anything, but given that any Brexit deal seemingly screws over Northern Ireland, unification's popularity has already started rising. Basically it's going to be a turbulent few years for the UK, and that's the best-case scenario to boot.

SCHEER HOSED

Speaking of party leader resignations, Andrew Scheer resigned as leader of the Canadian Conservative Party this week, ostensibly because he was spending party funds on private school but really, that's bullshit and it's because the party decided it was time for him to go spend time on a farm somewhere where he can jump and play in the fields. Peter Mackay got in trouble a few weeks ago for saying on American TV "okay, honestly, Scheer fucking bobbled an easy out" but he was just saying what the party already thought.

Was Scheer actually stealing party funds? Highly doubtful. I mean, the party leader doesn't get a literal blank chequebook and Scheer has been in charge of the party for several years now, and the executive director of the party already said "look, we knew about this" - which means it was just part of the usual dealmaking that happens when somebody becomes party leader. But it's still shady, and it looks shady to boot, which means it's an easy way to force somebody out of the leadership when they already know everybody wants them gone.

Michelle Rempel has already all but declared she's going to run for the leadership, along with Erin O'Toole and Peter Mackay. I fully expect Doug Ford to declare his intention to run, because Doug's entire life has been about failing upwards and why should he stop doing that now? (Plus, he's said he's taking French lessons, and the only reason Doug Ford would ever take French lessons is to run for the party leadership.) Jason Kenney, Scott Moe and Brian Pallister might well all also run for the nomination (Kenney is most likely, I think, since he's always wanted to run), and maybe John Baird and Rona Ambrose, and at that point you've pretty much run the gamut of Tory heavyweights who haven't humiliated themselves since the last leadership race.

That said, were I planning to wager on this race, I'd be putting my money on one of the premiers. The Conservative party's base - you know, the ones who actually pick the leader - has been moving steadily right for years now, and they don't want a moderate; they want a firebreather, and the premiers are the most likely to give them that (with Moe and Pallister being the "compromise" choices because they don't scream a lot, and Kenney and Ford being the red-meat options).

THIS WEEK'S GRAB-BAG OF DEPRESSING CLIMATE NEWS

The Madrid climate summit ended today and it is mostly a big pile of nothing. The short short version of a week of negotiation is that all countries have to come up with new carbon reduction pledges that are more intensive than the Paris Accord pledges by the next climate summit, which is next year in Glasgow.

The real problem is that the political conflict driving the problem is one where you have two distinct sides. The first side is most of Europe, Africa, Latin and South America, and Polynesia, all of which want more ambitious carbon reduction goals and even carbon re-sink goals. (Not for nothing is the fact that a lot of these countries will be hit harder than average by global warming.) The second side is basically the USA, Russia, China, India, Australia and Brazil, who are all huge polluters and who are all either outright opposed to carbon reduction period or who want to ensure that their competitive economic advantages aren't dimmed by having to meet climate change targets, and also incidentally somewhere in between three and five of those countries - depending on how you want to count it - are extremely authoritarian.

This leads us to the second real problem, which is: we've always sort of wondered what would happen when the rubber met the road with respect to the real problem of climate change, which is that a solution needs everybody coming to the table and pitching in, and that international law is really inefficient (at best) or ineffective (at worst) at dealing with recalcitrant actors. And the problem is worse when you're talking about climate change, since the entire world has mostly been fucking around since the Kyoto Protocol, which was signed more than twenty years ago and which has technically been in force for almost fifteen, so who has the moral authority to wag a finger and say "you're being bad?" Answer: nobody.

Anyway, in case you were wondering why this was relevant, there's a heap of new evidence that the Arctic is now, rather than being a greenhouse sink, now instead a greenhouse gas emitter since the warming we've already created has warmed the Arctic enough that it can start releasing all the CO2 and methane which was previously trapped in the frozen soil. This has always been sort of a particularly dire scenario - it's called the "Methane Clathrate Gun" scenario, and it's called that because a lot of climate scientists have likened it to putting a gun to one's own head, except the head belongs to, uh, most life on Earth really. Also, cod fisheries in Alaska are shutting down because of cod die-offs due to warming waters and Greenland's ice loss has septupled since the 1990s, which in turn means that all previous estimates about global flooding - which were already bad - are now too optimistic.

So that's great.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Apollo 11 (2019, Todd Douglas Miller, on-demand) - 4/5

The Report (2019, Scott Z. Burns, Amazon Prime) - 3.5/5

Watchmen wrapped up its first season this week (which may be its only season, but I doubt it given that it's been a hit) and while I was impressed with it at first I am now at the point where I think it's in the running for best TV show of the year; literally every thing in the first half of the season where I was saying things along the lines of "okay, seriously, why are they showing this, where is this going" were not only explained but in fact became so important that it made me retroactively re-evaluate the episodes. It's a near-perfect puzzle box of a TV show, whose only flaw is, really, that you have to have read the comic first. But, other than that, highest possible recommendation.

See you in seven.