Britain

US regulators have discovered German carmaker Volkswagen has been systematically cheating its emissions tests on diesel vehicles, in order to increase its profits. The scale of the scandal is huge, with Volkswagen subsequently admitting to installing “defeat devices” on 11 million of its vehicles.

In the days following Jeremy Corbyn's inspirational landslide victory in the Labour leadership election, the Tories, the right-wing press, and the Blairites within the Labour Party have stepped up their campaign of hysteria and attacks against the new Labour leader. We call on all our readers to get organised in defence of Corbyn. Hands Off Corbyn!

“The Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family's security.” This was the way in which David Cameron greeted Jeremy Corbyn’s victory on twitter. None of the usual parliamentary niceties, straight onto scare-mongering. In case the message had been lost, Cameron’s tweet was followed by a video produced by Conservative Party HQ full of images of gun touting ISIS terrorists running around in tanks and jeeps waving black flags.

In March 2009, the Information Commissioner’s Office (a public body set up to investigate the misuse of individuals’ private information) exposed the existence of a ‘blacklist’ containing the names of 3,213 individuals, largely construction workers. The “Consulting Association”, as it was known, had operated from 1993, systematically compiling a database of workers’ personal details as well as substantive entries regarding their conduct, political affiliations and trade union activities.

Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning victory in the Labour leadership election has dealt a decisive blow to the right-wing of the party. It has exposed as false the empty Blairite rhetoric about the importance of the “middle ground” and is a denunciation of the abandonment of Labour’s socialist policies in the New Labour years.

This astonishing victory of Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party represents a political earthquake of monumental proportions. It has turned the political map of Britain upside down. Hundreds of thousands of workers and youth, desperate for change, are celebrating this victory all over the country. Michael Meacher has correctly described the Corbyn campaign as “the biggest non-revolutionary upturning of the social order.”

100 days that shook Britain. That should be the name historians give to this summer’s Labour leadership campaign, if not for the fact that the next 100 days, in which Corbyn will most likely be leader of the party, will shake Britain much more still.

After weeks of participating in the despicable, racist bile being thrown at the thousands of desperate Asian and African refugees making their way to Europe, David Cameron has announced that he would allow 20,000 people to find refuge in Britain over the next five years. This announcement is the very definition of a political fudge, but it is one which will have fatal consequences for many innocent people.

This Labour leadership election, hailed by Jeremy Corbyn as the most democratic party leadership election ever, is being stained by the purge of left-wing members and supporters from the Party. Last week saw a Kafka-esque wave of letters sent out by Party bureaucrats informing thousands of people that they would not be allowed to vote in the leadership election because they did not support the “aims and values of the Party” or because they support an organisation opposed to Labour.

A political earthquake is shaking the Labour Party to its foundations. An unprecedented 610,000 are voting to elect a new leader. The ramifications are being felt everywhere. The mood of anger and bitterness that has built up in society was desperately searching for an outlet. In Scotland, it found the outlet in the Referendum and the rise of the SNP. Now Corbyn’s campaign for Labour leader has acted like a lightning rod for this discontent. It appears to be unstoppable, with Jeremy Corbyn on course to win the Labour leadership contest.

The Corbyn campaign for Labour leadership, it seems, likes to operate at the 11th hour. It was only with two minutes to go that Corbyn reached the required 35 nominations from MPs. And now, in the final 24 hours before the registration deadline, over 160,000 people have applied as members or supporters in order to vote in the leadership contest. Nobody is in any doubt as to who the vast majority of these applicants will be supporting.

Yesterday evening 2,500 people descended on central London to hear Jeremy Corbyn put forward a bold alternative to austerity at the latest in a series of mass meetings taking place up a down the country. The rally was so oversubscribed that despite the main hall of the cavernous Camden Centre being packed to bursting point, two other ‘overflow’ halls were filled with Corbyn supporters, while hundreds more waited outside, unable to squeeze into the building.

The vote on the Tories’ welfare reform bill, which would see £12 billion cut from the welfare budget, has revealed the depths of servility to which the Blairite leaders of the Labour Party like Harriet Harman are prepared to stoop. This issue has burst open the abscess at the heart of the Labour Party leadership, exposing the depth of rottenness that has set in: 184 members shamefully abstained on the Tory proposals. Meanwhile a fifth of the parliamentary party, 48 MPs, including many of the 2015 intake, rejected the leadership’s stance in one of the biggest Labour rebellions in recent years.