THIS WEEK IN THE ONGOING CLUSTERFUCK THAT IS BREXIT

A whole lot of stuff happened this week in Brexitland. First up, Theresa May's government finally produced a Brexit withdrawal plan that the EU would agree to. This is a little complicated if you haven't been following Brexit closely, partially because it's a complex policy slog, and partially because terms like "hard Brexit" and "soft Brexit" are being used by various people to mean various things. So I'm just going to do my best to explain how Brexit actually works (or, more accurately, does not work) and then go on from there with the ramifications of what happens next.

First off: due to the UK's revocation of Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union on March 29, 2017, the UK is scheduled to leave the EU, full stop, on March 29, 2019 (two years after revocation). If they don't have a deal to more steadily manage the withdrawal (IE, a sort of transition stage from EU member to non-EU member), that's what's being called "no-deal Brexit." This is sometimes also called "hard Brexit," but that term more accurately means "whenever the UK concludes its exit from the EU, it has little or no shared regulatory frameworks with the EU." So a no-deal Brexit is also, by definition, a hard Brexit (since if you leave without a withdrawal deal in place you'll get a hard Brexit whether you want it or not), but a hard Brexit doesn't require a no-deal Brexit.

Now, a "soft Brexit" is one where the end result is "something like Norway," where Norway is part of the European Economic Area (which is not the same thing as the EU), and still pays dues to the EU and is incorporated into EU freedom of movement laws, but 1. gets to ignore some EU laws with which they don't agree and 2. doesn't get to vote on EU laws as a result. Basically, "soft Brexit" means "compromise on an association agreement with the EU as a sort of side-deal member."

A very important thing to remember in order to understand anything about Brexit is that just about every first-world nation has agreed to certain terms as part of its membership in the World Trade Organization (the WTO, which you have probably heard of) which constitute the basic rules of international trade. Either you follow the rules, or you face economic sanctions (it is actually much more complicated than this, of course, but that is the general gist). The United Kingdom is, of course, a WTO member, and Brexit is actually massively dangerous for them because of WTO rules - or, more specifically, the rule stating that where no trade agreements exist, WTO members shall treat other trading partners equally.

This is why trade agreements are so vitally important in the modern global economy. Let us take three hypothetical nations who are WTO members: Bigland, Middlevania, and Smallistan. Say Smallistan wants to be able to purchase avocados cheaply from Middlevania, because they love avocados in Smallistan. Smallistan can't just say "okay, we're going to eliminate all tariffs on avocados from Middlevania" without ALSO eliminating 1. all tariffs on other members of the class of agricultural produce from Middlevania and 2. all tariffs on those same types of agricultural produce from Bigland, who can swamp Smallistan with cheap agricultural imports and put Smallistan's local cabbage industry out of business due to massive amounts of cheap Biglandish cabbage. This is why trade agreements exist: they're what allow nations to contract out of WTO law and what allow international trade to work, and ostensibly what keep big countries from trade-bullying small countries. (How well it works at achieving the latter is, of course, a subject for debate.)

I chose food for my hypothetical example precisely because it's actually completely relevant to the problem the UK faces right now. Once the UK leaves the EU, it doesn't have any unilateral trade deals with anybody, anywhere, because as a member of the EU all of its trade was conducted as an EU member - which means everybody else had trade deals with the EU as a whole and not its member nations. And the UK is a net food importer which also has a sizable domestic agricultural industry, which means if it lowers tariffs for one country to export food to the UK (e.g. the stuff they can't supply themselves, like fresh produce during the winter), it will have to lower tariffs for everybody - which means the UK will get flooded with cheap foreign food. Which is disastrous for British farmers.

Trade deals are only one aspect of why a "no-deal Brexit" would be disastrous for the UK. No-deal Brexit means no rules on freedom of movement, and expedited border crossing is massively important for the EU as a whole but certainly just as important for the UK, whose manufacturing industries are largely dependent on parts produced elsewhere (particularly the automotive manufacturing that's centrally important to much of Britain's economy) - and then, of course, there's the issue of the Northern Ireland/Ireland border, where EU membership and freedom of movement was a critical factor in allowing the Troubles to die down, and where inter-Irish trade is so uniform that large chunks of Northern Ireland just do business with Irish partners directly on the other side of the border on a daily basis. (Ireland and Northern Ireland actually share their electricity market. It's just more practical that way.)

But wait, there's even more! It's not just trade deals. It's everything. Before the UK was an EU member, it had bilateral agreements with most other countries in the world for everything: research agreements, regulatory agreements, you name it. But all of these agreements have expiry dates, and they're all gone now, because for forty years all of the UK's agreements of these sorts have been negotiated under the auspice of the EU, and getting the benefit of a much larger partner's negotiating weight. On March 29, all of that goes away.

Let me put it this way: UK citizens literally won't be able to drive anywhere else in the world, because there won't be a government in the world that formally recognizes a UK driver's licence as evidence of ability to drive. That all got handled via the EU. If, for example, you are a truck driver who wants to drive to France to deliver goods via the Chunnel, you will have to apply for a temporary visa to travel in France. And then you'll have to apply for a temporary driver's license. And then you will have to apply for insurance to protect your truck, and your goods, and your visa. And you'll have to apply for that insurance in the EU, because the insurance brokers in the UK will have lost their passporting rights. By this point you should understand no-deal Brexit means that the UK's trade will completely collapse. (Regional British governments are literally starting to worry about stockpiling food.)

I could honestly write another half dozen paragraphs about how bad no-deal Brexit can get (every time you think it's as bad as it gets, something else pops up and hey presto it's worse; I haven't even talked about their power grid issues yet but I can't keep going forever) but let's get down to the actual "news" portion of this item, which is: Theresa May's government produced a Brexit withdrawal deal.

The agreement basically gives the UK a transition period wherein it will mostly, for operational purposes, still be a member of the EU - except it doesn't get to vote on EU laws or new treaties. It affirms that UK citizens in the EU and EU citizens in the UK can stay where they are, for the time being. It creates a "backstop" to ensure that there will be no hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and that if there's a problem down the road and the UK can't get its shit together, the UK will remain inside a "customs territory" if a trade agreement is not reached by 2020, which would be essentially junior EU membership with no say in laws or regulations; if the UK wanted out of all of this, they would have to form a joint committee with the EU, and then both sides would have to agree to end it. Which of course means that if the UK can't negotiate a comprehensive trade agreement with the EU by 2020 (which they can't do; negotiating something that complex will take several years at minimum; the recent EU/Japan trade megadeal took five and a half years to negotiate), the EU effectively gets a veto over whether the UK can ever stop being a junior member of the EU.

The agreement is far from perfect, because when you negotiate in desperation you don't get perfect, but it at least avoids the worst. Predictably, the hardcore Brexiteers in the UK hate hate hate this agreement. MP Dominic Raab resigned from his position in May's government because he stated that he could not "in good conscience support the terms proposed for our deal with the EU," which is much funnier when you know that Raab was the Brexit Secretary and thus was the person who actually negotiated the deal. Nadine Dorries, a hardcore Brexiteer renowned for her remarkable stupidity, complained that "this deal gives us no voice, no votes, no MEPs, no commissioner," and said that she wanted the Norway model for the UK, which would... give the UK none of those things. The Democratic Unionist Party, which is a Northern Irish party of insane bigots, basically threw a collective hissyfit. Meanwhile, on the other ideological side of the fence, the Scottish Nationalist Party want to know why Northern Ireland gets special treatment and Scotland (who strongly voted pro-remain in the Brexit referendum) doesn't.

What's next? The deal is going to go up for a vote in Parliament, and numerous Tories have already stated that they will not vote for it. The Democratic Unionists (who are propping up May's minority government) won't vote for it either. Which means it'll effectively be the Labour Party's decision as to whether the agreement happens or not, and here's the problem: nobody really knows what Labour is going to do, because although their constituency is generally in favour of remaining in the EU, there's a significant chunk that isn't - and that chunk includes party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who seems to be convinced that if the UK leaves the EU, the right-wing isolationist beliefs that fueled Brexit can be redirected towards international socialism. To me, this seems dubious.

Still, I would expect Corbyn to try to vote the agreement down, because it would trigger a no-confidence vote, and a successful no-confidence vote would trigger another general election, where Corbyn (not unfairly) thinks he would win. And then what? There are still quite a few hardcore Labour Brexiteers in the party. One of the truly weird things about Brexit is that although it is a viciously polarizing issue that divides the electorate, no political party has come out firmly as being pro-leave or pro-remain; there are Tory Remainers and Labour Brexiteers, which means that the most important political issue in the UK is a muddled mess, electorally speaking. So Corbyn could simply withdraw the UK's revocation of article 50 and keep the UK in the EU, which would by far be the most sensible solution - except he doesn't want to do that, and neither does a minority of his party.

So Brexit is on pace to continue, despite the fact that polling shows that a large majority of the country clearly does not want it to happen at this point and despite the fact that it is clearly impossible to achieve without seriously damaging the UK's economy and health for generations. It's honestly kind of amazing. Really, the only thing about Brexit this week that wasn't amazing was Andrew Scheer, of all people, deciding that it would be a good week for him to support it, because Andrew Scheer is five dolts blended in an industrial blender, molded into a human shape, and then dressed in a bad suit.

SPEAKING OF TORIES, UGH, DOUG FORD AND THE ONTARIO PC PARTY

Some weeks, insulting Doug Ford and the Ontario PC Party is fun - because Doug Ford is an incompetent bully, and deserves mockery every day of his miserable life - but this week it is spectacularly joyless.

This week's fall economic update is a collection of minor bad stuff and a sneak preview of the next budget, which is mostly what I expected: Doug Ford can't actually cut the Ontario budget that much without doing serious damage to a lot of people's lives, so he's mostly just going to let Ontario continue to have about a $15 billion deficit (at least; the loss of cap-and-trade provincial revenues and the revenue hits from his tax cuts will probably make it a few billion worse in the end). This was always the most likely outcome, because most people on a day-to-day basis don't really care that deeply about deficits; they're just something for you to get angry about when the other side creates them. Expect some blather from Ford about how he "can't fix all of the Liberals' mistakes overnight" or similar, and then never fixing anything.

A tax break for rich people is exactly what he promised, of course, and it's not surprising, but what's a quarter of a billion dollars per year between friends? Ending rent control for newly constructed buildings won't result in developers building more rental apartments (and we know this, because Ontario's tried it before and it doesn't work, because developers make more and quicker profits by building for-purchase developments than they do managing apartment complexes), but it's not really going to make Ontario's rental expense crisis worse in the short term, so while I'm not happy about it I am not existentially disturbed; it's just stupid policy from The Stupid Party, par for the course. Eliminating the environmental commissioner's office and the Ontario Child Advocate and rolling their duties into other government departments isn't ideal, because Doug Ford and the Tories don't understand that when you give people more responsibilities, everything gets taken care of more slowly - but, again, it's not an existential crisis. It's just bad governance. It is reversible.

However, on Saturday night the PC party voted in support of a resolution that gender identity theory is "a highly controversial, unscientific liberal ideology; and, as such, that an Ontario PC Government will remove the teaching and promotion of 'gender identity theory' from Ontario schools and its curriculum." The resolution was drafted by famed shitbird Tanya Granic Allen (last seen getting booted from an MPP race in the last Ontario election for attacking gay marriage). Party flacks immediately seeking to perform damage control explained that the resolution was only going to be debated at the party convention next year, but let's be honest and admit three things: firstly, Doug Ford doesn't like queer people and has an extensive track record of demonstrating this. Secondly, the party fell in line when Ford insisted on the removal of the most recent sex-ed curriculum (which was queer-friendly in the most inoffensively basic ways, not that this stopped the bigot brigade from insisting that it taught kindergarteners about anal sex). And thirdly, the social conservatives have a lot of power within the party.

All of this speaks to the proposition that the resolution will likely pass next year, but the question of whether or not it will pass is largely immaterial; the fact that the party agreed that the resolution should be debated is evidence enough that they don't take trans rights seriously. And trans rights, to non-trans-parties not especially concerned with them, do not seem like a huge thing because there are so few trans people, but trans people are the canary in the coal mine, and the coal gas in this metaphor is the re-mainstreaming of prejudice against whichever minority the Tories and their ilk want official permission to discriminate against next.

As to why I get so angry about this: I've been gaming with trans people for years, because when you are a serious boardgames nerd (which I am) the first rule is that the only thing that disqualifies a person from the table is if they're rude or viciously unpleasant, because otherwise you always want more people to play games with. So I feel eminently qualified to say this: if you have spent no time around trans people? They're just people. That's all. There's nothing special about them except the amount of shit they go through just trying to exist, and the only reason we need laws to protect them is because cowards feel threatened by anything they don't understand.

Bottom line: the Ontario Tories a piece of shit political party and you should feel no need to respect them. Next.

QUICK HITS

New naval base in Papua New Guinea: It's a three-nation shared naval base between Australia, the USA and Papua New Guinea (who will presumably be contributing local workers and land rather than naval vessels or monetary support, considering PNG's navy consists of seven old patrol boats the Australians gave them, which are so broken down that Australia is now giving them brand new boats), and it's basically being built because "what if we have a war with China." This doesn't mean there's going to be a war with China any time soon, of course, but when you have a large military, being prepared for war is half of winning any war - hence this base. Really, it's mostly interesting because of Australia's involvement, because Aussie foreign policy over the past fifteen years has been a story of growing closer to China rather than more hostile (which makes sense based on simple geography). Maybe the Aussies just figure "hey, free naval base," or maybe it's just the latest see-saw in Australia deciding if it wants to be racist this week.

APEC summit: Speaking of China/America tensions, the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Co-Operation) summit just wrapped up (the announcement about the base was made there) and it was... not productive. Mike Pence attended instead of Donald Trump for the USA rather than Donald Trump, because Trump would have been a total disaster, but it is worth remembering that in addition to being a dedicated proponent of "The Handmaid's Tale, but for real," Mike Pence is also a remarkably dumb man with the policy understanding of, say, an otter. Accordingly, Pence spent most of a summit intended to serve as an opportunity to ease international economic tension threatening to drop even more tariffs on China, and hinting that countries participating in China's Belt-and-Road plan would face potential economic sanction from the USA. (I'm not going to get into the Belt-and-Road plan here, but it's fascinating and a fairly blatant attempt by China to secure economic domination of the Asian economy. All of it.) All of this would, of course, be bloody stupid, but remember what I said about Mike Pence being very dumb: I mean, the dude went to the Korean DMZ and made glinty-stare faces at North Korea and said that he wanted them to see how serious he was.

Anti-Babis protests in Czech Republic: Andrej Babis is the current Prime Minister of the Czech Republic and has gotten tons of comparisons to Donald Trump, because he is 1. rich and powerful, either the first or second richest person in the country, depending on who you ask 2. probably fairly corrupt re: being rich, and 3. ran on being an anti-corruption drain-the-swamp populist, but, again, he's kind of corrupt. (He's much less politically conservative than Trump, though.) His government lost a confidence vote in the legislature in January, so he somehow managed to form a new cabinet that could get 50% of the vote in the legislature by teaming up with the primary leftist party and continued to govern. Right now he's under investigation that he defrauded the EU for millions of dollars with his business, and his son, who has been called to testify in the investigation, and who publicly stated that his father was telling him he could either take an extended vacation or be committed to a mental hospital, has recently and conveniently disappeared - hence the protests, which have been drawing tens of thousands of people all week. Oh, and one other way he's different from Trump: he's probably still, even at this point, the most popular politician in the country. Politics! It's weird everywhere.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies seen this week:

Das Boot (1981, Wolfgang Petersen, on Blu-Ray) - 5/5

Overlord (2018, Julius Avery, theatre) - 3.5/5

The Hate U Give (2018, George Tillman Jr., theatre) - 4/5

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018, David Yates, theatre) - 1.5/5

More writing on all of these, as always, at my Letterboxd, which you can find here.

I'm also rereading Great Expectations because I haven't read it in twenty years, and it's a strong reminder that most high schools completely screw over Dickens by teaching A Tale of Two Cities as their obligatory Dickens study, because Tale is probably the most serious and least funny of all the Dickens novels, and teaching kids that Dickens - whose strength was his comedy - is boring is just a cardinal sin against literature.

That's it for this week. If you enjoyed it, like, share and subsc- no, wait, that's for Youtube videos. But you can share it with your friends and family and even strangers, just by sending them to this link! More subscribers is all to the good.