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

AS the TUC met in Brighton, figures were released by Megaphone that showed that in my area of north London 50 per cent of people were spending less on food and a similar number had cut back on heating as colder weather arrives. Meanwhile over 15 per cent had skipped meals they could no longer afford to eat.
This situation is not just the result of the disastrous hard-right experiment that was “Trussonomics,” but of 12 years of Tory austerity focused.
As Liz Truss departed, the focus was not on a general election but on who the next Tory prime minister who would run things for the few, not the many, should be.

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