“Groundhog Day” was how Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn described prime minister Theresa May’s speech in the House of Commons on Monday afternoon. He had a point. After May’s much-vaunted and much-mocked EU withdrawal agreement was finally put out of its misery the preceding Tuesday evening (followed by a failed Labour attempt to oust the government on Wednesday), the PM was back in parliament to present her plan B to the nation.
As she outlined a series of changes to her failed bill, it became clear that May’s tactic is, as ever, to plough on towards the 29 March deadline in the hope that she can get something passed in parliament. Backbench MPs, meanwhile, are hoping that the failure of May’s bill will give them the opportunity to make their own significant amendments to a withdrawal bill later in January. Meanwhile, the government says the next meaningful vote on a Brexit plan will be in February, just a few weeks before the 29 March exit date. If you look long enough into an abyss, the abyss looks into you…
While the UK government teeters in Brexitile dysfunction, the Trump administration has – naturally – gone one better. As we went to press, the partial shutdown of the US federal government has been going on for 31 days, meaning that 800,000 furloughed workers have missed two pay checques a potentially devastating side effect to Donald Trump’s sulking over a wall. Khushbu Shah travelled to Jesup, Georgia, where a major local employer is the federal prison, to see how people are coping under the “Trump shutdown”.
That phrase was one cannily thrown at Trump by the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, in a December meeting with the president. As that fiery exchange in the Oval Office proved, Trump may have finally met his political match with the sharp, master legislator from California. Our DC bureau chief David Smith explains how.
The last few weeks have seen major unrest in Sudan, where citizens, angry at the removal of a bread subsidy (among many other things), have taken to the streets to protest against the regime of Omar al-Bashir. This week Peter Beaumont and Zeinab Mohammed Salih look at how Sudan got to this latest important crossroads, while on page 45 Nesrine Malik wonders where the celebrities who were so prominent in the campaign to save Darfur are now that ordinary people are rising up to try to topple Bashir. We also have a report from our Africa correspondent Jason Burke on an anti-fuel tax uprising in Zimbabwe. The state response to which has brought back some of the worst memories of the Mugabe regime.
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