{"id":43717,"date":"2018-06-08T05:00:13","date_gmt":"2018-06-08T09:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43717"},"modified":"2018-06-07T13:00:47","modified_gmt":"2018-06-07T17:00:47","slug":"the-british-political-scene-has-all-the-horrific-fascination-of-a-slow-motion-car-crash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/06\/08\/the-british-political-scene-has-all-the-horrific-fascination-of-a-slow-motion-car-crash\/","title":{"rendered":"The British political scene has all the horrific fascination of a slow-motion car crash"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colby Cosh<\/a> says that anyone who claims to be shocked and appalled at the Ontario political mess need only glance across the pond to put things into proper perspective:<\/p>\n

The one thing everyone seems to agree upon about Ontario\u2019s provincial election is that it has been all kind of horrid, strange and exhausting; if there is another thing they agree upon, it is that Ontario politics will probably continue to be horrid, strange and exhausting for a while even when it\u2019s over. I have one word for these people: Brexit. Try following U.K. politics for a while in the era of British secession from the European Union. You will scurry, shrieking, back to Queen\u2019s Park soon enough.<\/p>\n

The Brexit drama is a mesmerizing blend of jargon and impotence, frustration and confusion; it is a vivisection of democracy from which Britain cannot avert its gaze. In Ontario you still have distinguishable political parties: in Britain now, familiar entities have been altogether dissolved into underlying tendencies, shades and conspiracies. So-and-so is a \u201csoft Brexiter.\u201d How soft? Oh, not as soft as Mr. Whatnot, but distinctly softer than Miss How-Do-You-Do. Mysterious verbal puzzles \u2014 do you favour the \u201csingle market\u201d or the \u201cinternal market\u201d? \u2014 become theatres of struggle.<\/p>\n

A bonus of Brexit-watching for us is that, over the past six months or so, you have often been able to get the brief neurochemical pop that Canadians all receive when Canada is mentioned abroad. The Canada-EU free-trade deal CETA, which you may remember being signed in October 2016 after some obscure trouble with Walloons, has turned out to be an important anchoring concept in the Brexit debate. CETA is the European Union\u2019s most liberal and comprehensive trade deal with an offshore non-member \u2014 and that is just what Britain voted to become.<\/p>\n

Advocates of a \u201chard\u201d Brexit, with no judicial, bureaucratic or fiscal ties to the continent, began pointing to CETA as a readymade model for Britain-EU relations almost before the ink was dry. Problem: CETA broadly allows free movement of goods between Canada and Europe, but services are not included. Britain doesn\u2019t make much physical stuff anymore, and it quit digging coal; it depends especially heavily on providing financial services to the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colby Cosh says that anyone who claims to be shocked and appalled at the Ontario political mess need only glance across the pond to put things into proper perspective: The one thing everyone seems to agree upon about Ontario\u2019s provincial election is that it has been all kind of horrid, strange and exhausting; if there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,62,53],"tags":[431,337,1090,143,114,1069],"class_list":["post-43717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-europe","category-politics","tag-conservatism","tag-eu","tag-jeremycorbyn","tag-labour","tag-separatism","tag-theresamay"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bn7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43718,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43717\/revisions\/43718"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}