News

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.

The attacks by the Islamic State (ISIS) on Paris, and on Shia Muslim suburbs of Beirut a few days earlier, are being marked as a new chapter in the “war on terror”.

The tragedy in Syria has taken another disastrous turn with the military intervention of Russia. This is being played out in its ruined cities and the waves of desperate refugees attempting to flee their homes.

Warplanes from the US, Russia, Turkey and their various allies have crowded the skies above the country. Now Russian, Iranian, Turkish and US troops are beginning to put boots on the ground.

November is set to be a crucial month for trade union members in Britain. With the third reading of the Tories’ Trade Union Bill due to take place this month we have a fight on our hands to defend our rights.

And this fight is not abstract — steel workers now fighting to defend their livelihoods, junior doctors taking to the streets in their tens of thousands, and public sector workers facing the eleventh year of pay restraint, all desperately need strong collective struggles.