THIS WEEK IN THE UNITED KINGDOM PERMANENTLY ENDING ANY REMAINING NOTION THE REST OF US EVER HAD ABOUT IT BEING IN ANY WAY SUPERIOR OR CLASSY

So this was certainly a week for Brexit news, which I say instead of “British news” because nowadays all British news is basically Brexit news unless Gordon Ramsay yells too loudly at a chef on teevee.

About a week and a half ago, Boris Johnson asked the Queen to allow him to prorogue Parliament, because if Parliament is closed it means there is a much better chance that the opposition parties cannot torpedo a no-deal Brexit by passing a law which states that the UK cannot leave the EU without a deal in place. This is of course an eminently sensible law, but at this point an increasing number of anti-EU voters in the UK have decided that leaving the EU without a trade deal in place is just a test of British resolve, like the Blitz. The problem with this metaphor is that the Blitz was A) horrible and B) not something the British underwent voluntarily, because that would have been insane.

Anyway, the opposition asked the Queen to disallow the proroguing of Parliament, which she is technically allowed to do, but the Queen said no, mostly because she was put in a situation where she had to pick a side and it was either actively doing something to pick a side or passively doing nothing to pick a side, so she picked option B. Probably the fact that this allowed her to sort of stick it to the EU was a bit of a bonus.

(This, incidentally, is the whole problem with the proroguing process, which Canadians discovered when Stephen Harper did it: the check and balance against abuse of the power is vested in a source which technically is the actual head of state, but actually is a figurehead who’s not supposed to ever wield any real and tangible political power, so giving them an actual, important political power is, it turns out, kind of a stupid idea. At this point you might be wondering what the actual value of a monarchy is, and as soon as you figure it out please let me know.)

So, Johnson’s plan was clear. Prorogue Parliament to condense the amount of time lawmakers spend convening and, you know, passing laws. Use that time to come up with a new deal by mid-October, then survive the Queen’s Speech (which is a confidence vote, which they need to survive to stay functioning as a government), then with a no-deal Brexit set to happen on October 31, ram whatever deal they could come up with down Parliament’s throat because presumably everybody would be terrified of a no-deal Brexit, because unlike the common dipshit on the streets, most of the MPs know that a no-deal Brexit would devastate the British economy for years.

Granted, there is one teeny problem with this plan, which is that the EU has absolutely no incentive to negotiate a different deal. Well, two teeny problems, because Ireland would veto any deal that doesn’t include an open border with Northern Ireland. Well, three, because Boris doesn’t have the votes to pass a deal that has an open Irish border because his majority was razor-thin to begin with and he couldn’t afford to piss off the Brexit hardliners. And actually there is of course a fourth teeny problem, which is that Boris Johnson is an idiot who could not negotiate his way out of a paper bag, which most people already knew but which was re-emphasized when it leaked that his idea was for Ireland to leave the EU and join the UK instead, which would technically solve everything if the Irish wanted to do that, which of course they fucking don’t. But other than these minor side issues, it was a plan!

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, the opposition parties were not happy with this, so before proroguing could actually take place, they used a bunch of parliamentary tactics and legal drafting, the details of which I will gloss over (because they’re not interesting to anybody who doesn’t really really care about parliamentary procedures), in order to reintroduce the “we can’t leave Brexit without a deal” law as a motion which couldn’t be prorogued, or forced into private sitting, or half a dozen other parliamentary tactics meant to quash debate in one way or another. The Tories, for their part, told everybody that anybody defecting to vote in favour of this motion would be kicked out of the party.

And, as debate on this motion ensued, Philip Lee - a Remainer Tory MP - crossed the floor and joined the Liberal Democrats (a pro-Remain centrist party). During a Boris Johnson speech, at that, which is a massive parliamentary fuck-you, all the moreso because Lee’s defection to the Lib Dems meant that the Tories no longer had a majority in Parliament. This was then seconded by the vote to allow a vote on the bill (remember how I said I didn’t want to get into specifics? this is why) - which passed 328-301, meaning 21 Tories jumped ship to support voting on the no-no-deal bill. All of those Tories were promptly kicked out of the party - including Ken Clarke, who has been a Tory MP six years longer than my Gen-X ass has been alive.

Johnson’s next trick was to try to call an election, which required a 2/3rds vote to pass. He did not come remotely close to this, because the opposition knew that if he called an election for mid-October, he would then be able to prorogue Parliament straight through past the deadline. They knew this because Johnson bragged about his cunning plan to journalists, because, as I have said previously, he is a very stupid man. So that was another failure for the Tories.

And then Boris Johnson’s brother, Jo Johnson (taking time off from his pro basketball career or his film directing career, you pick the reference and the joke you like best) resigned his MP seat because he stated he felt “torn between family loyalty and the national interest,” which is a nice way of saying “my idiot brother is a threat to the country.” And then Amber Rudd, the Work and Pensions secretary, resigned from the party saying she had seen no evidence that Team Boris was actually trying to negotiate a new deal.

At this point who knows what happens. Right now the opposition is riding high, to be sure, but the problem they have is that they barely agree on anything other than “no deal Brexit is really bad,” and it’s good they can at least agree on that but it’s like agreeing water is wet, and they don’t agree on much else and certainly not enough to form, say, a Labour government backed by literally every other MP in Parliament that isn’t a Tory or Democratic Unionist. They don’t want to call an election, because despite only polling at about 36%, the Tories would still likely come away with a majority of seats because first-past-the-post electoral systems are terrible (which is the other reason Boris keeps trying to call one). Some observers have noted that if the Tories call for a vote of confidence, this could lead to the weird situation where the Tories vote for no-confidence in themselves and everybody else votes to keep them in power, because British politics I guess.

Anyway, this is just a sterling reminder that voting dumb assholes into power generally doesn’t work out well.

THE TORY PLAYBOOK IN MANITOBA, REVEALED

Brian Pallister’s Manitoba Progressive Conservatives (yes, we all know the name stopped making sense years and years ago, it’s an artifact from an earlier time, move on) released their party platform last week in advance of Tuesday’s provincial election, and it’s the same-old same-old from this generation of Canadian Tories: a whackload of tax cuts, a ton of promised new spending, and a plan to pay for it all that’s a joke.

Specifically, Pallister’s plan is to cut education property taxes, which represent a cut of about $600m over the next ten years in budget revenue. Now, granted, property taxes shouldn’t be funding education anyway, because that’s a terrible idea (which is at least partially and probably mostly responsible for racial disparities in American public education, by the way). But just because it’s a bad funding model doesn’t mean the government doesn’t need the money, which they do. Particularly when Pallister is also promising massive amounts of new spending, including a whack of new education spending and $2 billion over ten years in health spending.

(Manitoba’s deficit last year was $521 billion, which is equal to about three percent of its budget expenditure. Which is pretty decent, in all fairness.)

It’s not discussed in Pallister’s plan, but some Manitoba budget wonks have suggested the natural solution to the revenue loss is to simply lower provincial transfers to municipalities and counties and then simply let the municipalities and counties raise property taxes in response. (This would effectively be a variant on the “downloading” strategy used by Mike Harris in Ontario in the 1990s, except instead of transferring service responsibilities this would simply be a transfer of taxation responsibilities.) Of course, this sort of solution can’t really be sold as a tax cut, because “now you will pay property taxes to the city rather than the province” isn’t anything anybody actually cares about, so Pallister’s proposed solution to pay for all his tax cuts and new spending is a “15% reduction in senior government management,” which of course is not nearly enough money, and “making the civil service more efficient,” which mostly doesn’t work either because civil services tend to be reasonably efficient already.

MADE: DORIAN

Now that Hurricane Dorian is in the record books and we can go back to hoping there isn’t another massive hurricane coming during this year’s Atlantic hurricane season - which is unlikely, because so far there have only been two hurricanes this season (Barry and Dorian), which would be the lowest year for hurricanes since 2013 (which was a massive outlier). But some takeaways are helpful.

Firstly, when talking about climate change and hurricanes, it’s helpful to think of climate change as a contributor rather than a cause. Global warming skeptics love to mock people who say “climate change causes hurricanes,” because, no, we’ve always had hurricanes. But climate change means warmer water and warmer atmosphere, which are two things that help make more hurricanes and deadlier hurricanes. Contributor, not cause.

Secondly - and this is a thing that has long been a discussion in the meteorological community and that discussion has picked up significantly in recent years - we’re still sort of dealing with outmoded ways of describing hurricanes. Like, Dorian was a Category 5 hurricane, and we all know that’s bad because 5 is the biggest number we have for hurricanes, and certainly Dorian was a terrible storm that smashed the Bahamas - but the category system really only describes wind speed. Sure, high winds are bad and can destroy things, but wind speed isn’t the only way hurricanes damage human society.

Think back to Hurricane Harvey in 2017 - Harvey was an awful storm and hit Texas as a Category 4 hurricane, but it collapsed really quickly into a tropical storm once it hit the coastline. Nothing about what I just wrote is inaccurate, but Harvey did most of its damage as a tropical storm, because it just stalled over Texas for several days dumping endless amounts of rain on everything. We don’t think of “a lot of rain” as being violent in the way that we think of hurricanes, because it’s rain, it’s not a storm blowing houses over. But a house being blown over is basically the same as a house being flooded away: the end result is no house. Storm surge is another factor that “lesser” storms can create in nearly the same damaging amounts as larger storms can: Dorian barely grazed the American mainland coast, but storm surge created at least tens of millions of dollars in damages along the Atlantic coast, because you don’t need the storm to get close to create flooding waves.

Thirdly and lastly - this new hurricane environment is baked in at this point. We’re already experiencing the initial stages of climate change-affecting hurricanes and it’s going to get worse because a certain amount of temperature rise is inevitable at this point; climate change strategies are about mitigating future damage, not preventing current damage at this point. So infrastructure anywhere near oceanic coast (and probably a lot of inland rivers and lakes) needs to be built with this new environment in mind.

Interesting times, as they say.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched recently:

Someone Great (2019, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, Netflix) - 3.5/5

The Red Sea Diving Resort (2019, Gideon Raff, Netflix) - 2/5

The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Kanopy) - 4.5/5

The CNN “Climate Town Hall” was really good, letting all ten of the Democratic candidates who might actually have at least a tiny chance of becoming President talk at length about climate change policy, and most of them were pretty good at it and the audience questions were smart and detailed, so check out the highlights if you can (because it was nearly seven hours of politicians talking with people so the highlights are necessary). Also, Great British Bake Off is back for season ten, so of course we are watching it. Current early favorite: Michelle, if only for the general Welshness.

See you in seven.