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

WITH the government’s chaotic handling of Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, suddenly announcing changes late at night on Twitter, the attractiveness of a summer break in Britain, for those still able to afford it, has more attraction than usual.
The August weather is notoriously unreliable, but for socialists there is a chance to visit some of the locations that Marx and Engels enjoyed in the second half of the 19th century.
Not quite all are by the sea. There are references in the correspondence to Buxton, then a major spa town, and within reach of Manchester, for example.

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