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 film Misbehaviour is currently on general release. It is about the protest at the 1970 Miss World beauty contest, compered by reactionary “comic” Bob Hope, where feminists disrupted proceedings at the Albert Hall by throwing flour bombs and rotten vegetables.
In the film Keira Knightley plays one of the protesters, Sally Alexander. The film also features a scene, manufactured for dramatic effect, with her then partner Gareth Stedman Jones.
Both are socialist historians and founding editors of the History Workshop Journal, which continues to be published to this day, styled as a journal of socialist and feminist historians.

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