The 2016 national conference of the Marxist Student Federation will take place on Saturday 13th February in SOAS university, London. We encourage everyone who is interested in the ideas of Marxism and who would like to meet Marxist student activists from all over Britain to attend and participate in the debates and discussions.

The Corbyn movement that began last summer represented the beginning of a political revolution inside the Labour Party. But this transformation is not yet complete. On the one hand, thanks to his enormous grassroots support, Corbyn has weathered the storm of hysteria and attacks from the Tory press and the Blairites, emerging stronger in his position as leader. On the other hand, however, the right wing of the Labour Party, residing primarily in Westminster, has not been completely routed and continues to skirmish with Corbyn in an attempt to destabilise and discredit him as leader. Corbyn has won many battles thus far; but Labour’s civil war is far from over.

George Osborne, the Tory chancellor, who only six weeks ago was boasting about the strength of the British economy, has now had to issue a bleak warning for the coming year. 2016 could mark “the beginning of the decline” for Britain unless the country swallows a large dose of austerity medicine. A culmination of weakening world growth, plummeting oil prices, and a sharp slowdown in China, amongst other things, has blown Osborne’s economic predictions out of the water. His latest talk is of “a dangerous cocktail of new threats”, which have suddenly emerged.

In the end it was by no means the “night of the long knives” that the national press were predicting. However, the reshuffle of Labour’s shadow cabinet in Westminster was critical enough to enrage the Blairites who infest the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP).

2015 was a turbulent year in British politics, with the general election, mass demonstrations, and the rise of the Corbyn movement. Rob Sewell, editor of Socialist Appeal, looks ahead to what 2016 has in store, as the Tories ramp up their austerity and the Blairites sharpen their knifes in preparation to stab Corbyn in the back.

Junior doctors in Britain are preparing to strike next week for the first time in their history. We publish today a statement by Dr. Yannis Gourtsoyannis, a member of the BMA (British Medical Association) national executive junior doctors committee, calling for united working class action to defend the junior doctors and fight austerity.

Everyone was on the edge of their seats, braced for terrible news. The grim realities of life ‘up North’ were about to come crashing down onto Corbyn’s hippy head, sending his naive dreams scattering into a puddle along with his crown of flowers.

Following nearly eleven hours of heated parliamentary debate, Cameron secured a big parliamentary majority for the bombing of Syria. All kinds of arguments were dug up and used to justify this action. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury declared his support for this “just war”, as the Church had done on all previous occasions.

Members of Parliament, tomorrow, will once again be voting on whether to take the country to war in the Middle East. Cameron is leading the charge; but after a retreat by Corbyn, right-wing Labour MPs will now have a free hand to support the Tory leader. The question of Syria has brought all the contradictions in the Labour Party to the surface. The Blairites’ enthusiasm for yet another imperialist adventure, however, may well be their demise.

David Cameron is once again banging the war drum for intervention in Syria. Having been defeated on the issue in 2013, Cameron is now cynically using the horrific attacks in Paris to attempt to whip up support for military action, attempting to capitalise on the understandable outrage of millions against the barbaric ISIS.

As Osborne takes his axe to welfare spending, hacking away at the livelihoods of the most vulnerable layers of society, millions will be facing a very bleak Christmas indeed. The Tories will see to it that for many it will not be a season of joy and goodwill.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn provided the one thing that was lacking in Britain: a point of reference for the accumulated discontent and frustration of the masses. It is beginning to regenerate the Labour Party and push it to the left. That represents a mortal danger to the ruling class and they will stop at nothing to destroy it.

For a very long time British politics has resembled a stagnant pond.  With the election of Jeremy Corbyn in a landslide victory it felt as if a huge stone had been thrown into it, making gigantic waves that have transformed the entire political landscape. But not everyone is pleased.

On Friday 6^th November, Andrew Fisher – a longstanding Labour left-winger, recently appointed as a political advisor to Jeremy Corbyn – was suspended from the Labour Party. His crime? A single tweet, sent in August 2014, in which he satirically called upon those in Croydon South constituency to vote for the candidate from Class War, an anarchist organisation, instead of the Blairite Labour candidate, Emily Benn.

Tata, the giant Indian-owned conglomerate, has announced the closure of its steel plants in Scunthorpe and Scotland, with a resultant 1,200 jobs to be cut. This latest episode in the crisis of the British steel industry is yet another stark reminder of the decrepit nature of British capitalism and of the contradictions within the wider world economy.