Socialism Today Issue 296 April 2026

Amid the unfolding chaos and turmoil of Trump’s war on Iran, HANNAH SELL assesses its origins and global consequences.

The conflict that has raged for over three weeks in the Gulf, and continues as we go to press, is the third US war in the region since the end of the Cold War more than three decades ago. Every aspect of the current conflict demonstrates the weakening of US imperialism over that period. President Donald Trump’s chaotic and reckless approach is both a reflection of the USA’s relative decline and an accelerator of it. Whatever happens from here, the consequences are certain to include a new, qualitative undermining of the power and authority of US imperialism.

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“This country is now facing the existential risk of a lost generation”. Those were the words of Alan Milburn, the Blairite former health minister, speaking in February about his ongoing review into ‘NEETs’: young people not in education, employment, or training. 

The ‘Milburn Review’ is set to be released in the summer, with an interim report due later this spring. According to the most recent figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), almost one million 16-24 year olds in Britain (957,000) were in the category of NEET as of December 2025. 

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Local government reorganisation is being presented by ministers and council leaders as a rational, modernising reform – a necessary step to “streamline services”, “drive efficiencies” and create “strategic authorities fit for the future”. In reality this poses one of the most serious threats to local democracy, jobs, pay and public services in a generation. For working-class communities and council workers alike, local government reorganisation risks becoming austerity by another name.

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US president Donald Trump is continuing his attacks on climate regulation, with his latest focus on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for setting national environmental standards in the US. He has moved to rescind the ‘endangerment finding’, the legal foundation underpinning key regulations on pollution, boasting “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen”.

The endangerment finding, issued under Barak Obama, formally concluded that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health. It has been called the climate ‘Magna Carta’: its removal could unravel the entire edifice of US climate regulation, stripping the legal basis from rules limiting heat-trapping pollution from automobiles to power plants.

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This year the University and College Union (UCU) will be marking its 20th anniversary. Drawing lessons from the two decades of its existence, BEA GARDNER explains how a genuinely combative member-led union can be built.

The University and College Union (UCU) was founded in 2006 following the merger of the Association of University Teachers (AUT), which represented workers in the old universities, and the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), which represented workers in colleges and new universities. As a result UCU became the largest post-16 education union in the world. UCU covers Higher Education (HE), Further Education (FE), Adult and Community Education (ACE) and prison education and has over 120,000 members organised in branches according to their employers and corresponding sector.

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April is the anniversary of the 1916 Easter rising and the execution by the British state of the great Irish Marxist James Connolly. In commemoration we reprint below an article by PETER HADDEN, a leading member of the CWI until his death in 2010, reviewing Connolly’s life of unremitting struggle, first published in Socialism Today No.100, April 2006. This is followed, on page 28, by a contemporary article by Vladimir Lenin, defending the rising and drawing inspiration from it amidst the slaughter of a world at war.

In 1910 James Connolly concluded his pamphlet, Labour, Nationality and Religion, in the simplest and most straightforward terms: “The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system, it must go”. On the anniversary of his death it is necessary to begin any true account of James Connolly’s life with reminders of what he really believed in, what he really fought for.

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The Easter rising was a defeat, acknowledged as such by Vladimir Lenin in the article written in the summer of 1916 reprinted below. “The misfortune” of the Irish rebels, he argued, was that “they rose prematurely”, before the inevitable revolt of the working classes of Europe against the horrors of the first world war “had had time to mature”.

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I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

By Hu Anyan

Published by Allen Lane, 2025, £12.99

Reviewed by Pete Mason

In September 2020, a video of an elite Tsinghua university student perilously riding his bicycle while working on his laptop went viral in China. He came to symbolise the crazy, self-defeating race to the bottom, termed ‘involution’, caused by extreme competition.

Within a year, involution hashtags were viewed over a billion times in China. The term ‘996’ had gone viral in China in 2019. Working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week, is demanded ‘voluntarily’ by many firms, particularly in IT and very typically of Chinese migrant workers, who have gone in search of work in other provinces.

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