3 Critical and Radical Social Work • vol 5 • no 1 • 3–6 • © Policy Press 2017 • #CRSW Print ISSN 2049 8608 • Online ISSN 2049 8675 • https://doi.org/10.1332/204986017X14835299040495 Accepted for publication 05 December 2016 • First published online 06 January 2017 editorial Looking back on 2016 Iain Ferguson, Iain.Ferguson@uws.ac.uk University of the West of Scotland, UK Michael Lavalette, lavalem@hope.ac.uk Liverpool Hope University, UK key words Brexit • 2016 US presidential election • neoliberal globalisation • racism • child poverty To cite this article: Ferguson, I, Lavalette, M (2017) Looking back on 2016, Critical and Radical Social Work, vol 5 no 1, 3–6, DOI: 10.1332/204986017X14835299040495 This issue of Critical and Radical Social Work goes to press as we approach the end of 2016. By any standards, 2016 was a grim year for anyone seeking progressive change. Among its many horrors, two developments are particularly worthy of mention here. The frst development is the growth of racism and fascism across the Western world on a scale not seen since the 1930s. Both the outcome of the Brexit referendum campaign in the UK (a campaign that became a race to the bottom to see which side could outdo the other in terms of anti-immigrant hostility) and the election of Donald Trump as President in the US in November following a foul racist and misogynistic campaign have clearly given confdence to racists and far-right organisations and led to a spike in racist incidents and attacks. Neo-Nazi parties are openly parading their strength in Eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary. Also, looming over all of this is the possibility that the fascist Front National under Marine Le Pen will perform strongly in the presidential elections in France in 2017. In the face of these developments, it is necessary to emphasise three things. First, it would be wrong to see the election of Trump in the US or the Brexit vote in the UK as purely and simply an expression of racism among white working-class males, as many commentators have suggested. In reality, it was not a Republican surge that won the election; rather, it was a Democrat slump. Trump won barely a million more votes overall, and a lower proportion of white votes, than losing Republican candidate Mitt Romney did in 2012. Romney won 59% of white voters to Obama’s 39%, whereas Trump won 58% to Clinton’s 37%. Furthermore, of the nearly 700 counties that twice sent Obama to the White House, a stunning one third fipped to support Trump. So, areas that voted for Trump in 2016 had twice voted for the US’s frst black president. Racism was certainly a factor in Trump’s success, but it did not provide any increase in the Republican vote overall (Nielsen, 2016). In addition, it is worth pointing out that 29% of Latinos and 42% of women voted for Trump. A more accurate way of understanding these results was ofered by the British Labour MP Diane Abbott, who described the Brexit result in the UK as ‘a roar of Unauthenticated | Downloaded 06/19/22 06:32 AM UTC