New Year: champagne in the glasses and celebration of the new year with its promises and hopes. But there is not much hope and optimism in the Danish media. The New Year started with the introduction of ID-control on the Danish-Swedish border. Not since 1954 has it been necessary to show identification between the two Scandinavian countries. For more than 60 years you could travel freely between them. This is extremely indicative of the situation at the dawn of 2016.

With just a few weeks in office, the Socialist Party (PS) government of Portugal has orchestrated yet another scandal in its history, with the main protagonist being the bankrupt bank “Banco Internacional do Funchal SA” (Banif).

This article was first published on the left-wing Ukrainian website Liva.com.ua and translated by a comrade of the IMT. Following the truce in Donbass it offers some important insights into the cost of the war in the Ukraine from an economic, social and political perspective.

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.

After the election results came out, one of the spokespersons of the incumbent right-wing party PP described Spain as “ungovernable”. This is an apt picture of the country at the moment.

On Sunday 20 of December, Spaniards are called to the polls in what is set to be a momentous election. These are possibly the most important elections since the fall of the Franco dictatorship in 1975.

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.

In the first round of the French regional elections the right wing nationalist party, National Front, came out as the largest party. Here we publish the first comments by the French Marxist journal Révolution.

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.

The French ruling class have cynically used the recent terrorist attacks as an excuse to clamp down on any dissent whatsoever across the country. The attacks by ISIS have been used opportunistically by president Francois Hollande, the most unpopular president since the 1950s. Increasing austerity and the deepening crisis has led to tensions reaching boiling point, as seen with the recent dispute at Air France, where bosses were chased out of their offices by workers facing redundancy. Although the declared aim of the State of Emergency is to combat terrorism, the French state has wasted no time in seizing the opportunity to attack those on the left.

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.