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

PERHAPS for several understandable reasons the reality that 2020 has been a year of worldwide protest has been rather missing from the numerous media summaries of the last 12 months.
After all, a deadly pandemic has seized the world and led to illness and death, particularly in neoliberal economies that put profit ahead of people.
Yet protest there has been and its global nature has been dictated in part by lockdowns restricting to an extent physical protests.

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