As Colombia approaches presidential elections next year, the US decision to decertify the country in the war on drugs plays into the hands of its allies on the political right, writes NICK MacWILLIAM

THE opening moments of 2021 have seen a good deal of attention focused on the law.
A request by the US to extradite Julian Assange, essentially for exposing its role in the Iraq war, was turned down by a judge.
Not because it would be a fundamental attack on journalistic freedom but because incarceration in a US prison might further worsen Assange’s health, which has already been damaged by the British state keeping him locked up in Belmarsh.

In 1981, towering figure for the British left Tony Benn came a whisker away from victory, laying the way for a wave of left-wing Labour Party members, MPs and activism — all traces of which are now almost entirely purged by Starmer, writes KEITH FLETT

Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT

KEITH FLETT revisits debates about the name and structure of proposed working-class parties in the past

The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT