LUKE FLETCHER outlines Plaid Cymru bold plans for wide-ranging policy consultations with trade unions in Wales
Columbia and cocaine: President Gustavo eyes decriminalisation
The progressive government’s national drug policy aims to end the US-led ‘war on drugs’ by targeting major traffickers, not small farmers or users, writes WT WHITNEY JR
Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first progressive leader
Liverpool Trades Council has unveiled a ‘People’s Budget’ to fight £56m cuts and council tax rises. DEAN YOUNG reports
Labour’s by-election defeat tells a story Scotland has known since 2008. A party that assumes loyalty while offering little more than managed decline will eventually discover that voters always have somewhere else to turn, says MATT KERR
KENNY MacASKILL reminds us of the unprecedented political career of a Scottish miner’s militant son who stayed the course and true to his roots
by Henry Fowler, General Strike 100 project co-ordinator
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COLOMBIAN President Gustavo Petro insists that the “war on drugs has failed,” and is pushing for an approach he calls “phased decriminalisation.” His government is prioritising the initiative, which is part of its far-reaching programme for social and political reforms — all of which face strong right-wing political opposition.
At a big meeting on October 3 of mostly small farmers in El Tambo, in Cauca, where “the coca economy is the main way of life for thousands of peasants,” Colombia’s first-ever progressive president presented his government’s national drug policy for 2023.
The drug plan attends to some of the main features of Colombia’s longstanding social disaster. They include: dispossession leading to consolidation of large land holdings, agricultural underdevelopment, migrations leading to precarious lives often in cities, widespread lethal violence, and great wealth accumulated by top-level distributors and their financial backers.
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