News

David Cameron has set the date, 23 June, for the referendum on EU membership, and there’s a whiff of panic in the air.

The Tory party is split down the middle, with important figures such as current London mayor Boris Johnson opting for the leave camp in opposition to Cameron’s desire to stay.

Big business is also taking sides. Half the FTSE 100 top companies have signed a letter putting the business case for EU membership, though the capitalist class is by no means united on this.

Can a democratic socialist turn the White House red? Will the Republicans really go for a multi-billionaire who describes Mexicans as “rapists”? The US presidential primaries have thrown up a variety of surprising questions that say a lot about the state of both the left and right in the US.

Junior doctors announced three 48 hour strikes as SR went to press: 9 to 11 March, 6 to 8 April and 26 to 28 April. As this comes after the imposition of the new contract it is a significant escalation.

A poll found 66 percent of people in England support for junior doctors’ strikes, with 41 percent saying they are strongly supportive. Only 16 percent of people say they oppose the walkout.

The BMA will also launch a judicial review as the government failed to undertake an Equality Impact Assessment before making the changes.

Billionaire Donald Trump has pulled the debate for the US Republican presidential nomination so far to the right that we saw the spectacle of left-winger Michael Moore appearing on Fox News, defending one of their hosts.

Fox anchor Megyn Kelly has won the wrath of Trump by calling him out over sexism. She is not radically different to Trump, praising him for not caring about that politically correct culture.

On the fifth anniversary of the Arab Spring revolutions the rumblings of discontent continue to cause panic in the regimes. Arab rulers remain terrified of the ghost of revolution.

As Egyptian security forces moved to clamp down on any event to mark the uprising, protests in Tunisia erupted once again, sparking memories of the 2011 Arab revolutions. The demonstrations, which began in the city of Kasserine and spread to other Tunisian cities, demanded “Work, freedom, dignity”.

Hate crime rose a staggering 18 percent in the year to October, with 83 percent of the increase fuelled by racist incidents. Official Home Office statistics reveal that another 11 percent of the increase was driven by bigotry and homophobia, 6 percent by religious hatred, 5 percent by incidents against disabled people and 1 percent involving attacks on transgender people.

Heading into 2016 we are confronted with a world characterised by continuing war and chaos in the Middle East, a refugee crisis exacerbated by those wars, and a racist offensive at home feeding off both of these situations.

This issue of Socialist Review attempts to tackle all of these factors, and show how they are linked — as well as, crucially, suggesting how we can challenge them.

A recently published report by the London School of Economics, Moving the Goalposts, looks at the impact of austerity and growing inequality on young people’s participation in sport and play activities. Not surprisingly, it makes grim reading.

Stand Up To Racism (SUTR) will be taking a delegation to Calais on 11-12 December to highlight the severe winter conditions refugees are living in and take over much-needed collections.

The group is asking people to collect cash at work, trade union branches or elsewhere and buy SUTR festive cards that they will take over to Calais with solidarity messages and collections for refugees.

It is now established that all the perpetrators of the atrocious November 2015 attacks in Paris, like those of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January, were born and lived in France. It is important for us to understand the internal French context in which these attacks happened.

The nauseating but expected Islamophobic backlash across the Western world and particularly in France will only add to the political and socioeconomic discrimination that French Muslims have been enduring for decades.