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

WHEN Henry Mayhew started the series of social investigations into the London working class in 1849 that was to become London Labour and the London Poor, he laid out a prospectus in the Morning Chronicle.
He wrote of investigating the “large and comparatively unknown body of people” that comprised the labouring poor who lived in slum housing, often in insanitary conditions with, at best, uncertain employment. He set a pattern that has emerged at times of crisis since.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, revealing a US government and president in George W Bush who was not only unprepared to deal with it but had reduced funding previously for measures that might have helped, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Michael Brown said: “We’re seeing people that we didn’t know exist.”

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