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 disgraceful conditions at Manston in Kent provide a focus to 40 years of Tory racism. With Suella Braverman as home secretary and a terrorist-style attack on a Dover immigration centre by an individual with far-right links, the relationship between institutional racism and street racism becomes clearer.
When Enoch Powell made his “rivers of blood” speech in 1968, he was a senior Tory MP who found himself with no future in the party. This was the tail end of a period when the government was welcoming migrants to fill mostly badly paid gaps in the labour force.
After the oil-focused economic crisis of 1973, matters began to change. The racism inherent in much Tory politics began to be more openly displayed.

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