This week in Westminster was due to be one of the most momentous in memory, with Theresa May putting it all on the line for a vote in parliament on Tuesday evening on her EU withdrawal deal. Then, just as the media cleared the decks for a week of chaos on a vote the prime minister would surely lose … a different type of chaos: she pulled the vote from the floor, leading to a vote on her leadership on Wednesday evening. We’ll have more on the fallout from that (in)decision in next week’s magazine.
Before that happened, far-right figurehead Tommy Robinson led a march in London in support of Brexit. Robinson was outnumbered by counter-protesters but his growing influence is deeply troubling. In the latest from our series on the New Populism, we reveal the global network funding his work. Similarly, George Monbiot investigates how money from the Koch Foundation has been funding a far-right website in Britain.
Away from Britain, and on this week’s cover, a road trip through broken Venezuela. Twenty years ago, a firebrand populist was elected leader of the nation, promising to implement a “peaceful revolution” in the oil-rich country. The rise of Hugo Chávez would have dramatic implications. Now, under Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela is buckling under hyperinflation and a lack of food and medicine. To try to understand what two decades of Chavismo have meant, our Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips drove across the country to see if lingering affection for the man people still call mi comandante is stronger than a visible sense of despair.
We also have two excellent stories about China this week. The first, on page 15, tries to unravel the crisis facing Huawei, the telecoms behemoth run by former military technology expert Ren Zhengfei. Ren’s daughter and Huawei’s CFO, Meng Wanzhou, has been arrested in Canada, as the company is suspected of breaking sanctions on Iran – and many experts fear it could be a tool of the Chinese government. Can the world’s second-biggest smartphone maker rebound? Meanwhile, Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin investigate the Chinese government’s dramatic attempts to reshape the news around the world by exporting Chinese news brands – and values.
Finally, a selection of critics, writers and authors choose their best books of the year. From Anna Burns’s Booker-winning Milkman and Jonathan Coe’s Brexit-skewering Middle England, to biographies of Thomas Cromwell and Tiger Woods, it’s been a fine year to bury your head in a book. We hope you enjoy our picks.
We’ll be back next week with our annual review of the year’s events around the world and a look forward to what we can expect in 2019.
