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 latest offensive by Keir Starmer and those around him to marginalise the left in the Labour Party has captured media headlines, and of course, the full approval of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times.
Starmer, whose grasp of the dynamics of capitalism does not appear to be significant, most likely does not understand that it is the market system itself that creates the material conditions for a political left, seeking to focus ways of changing it. A left politics cannot simply be purged out of existence.
How that presents itself politically can vary, but we are coming up to the anniversary of the events that led to the formation of the first ever minority Labour government on January 22 1924.

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