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 government’s plan to remove small and medium businesses from regulation is typical of a madcap government that loves announcements but ignores reality as we have already seen in Kwasi Kwarteng’s U-turn on tax cuts. We need clarity urgently and in reality, we need more regulation and enforcement, not less.
Since being elected to represent my home city, I have been campaigning to end the scourge of exploitation that has plagued sections of Leicester’s garment industry for decades. Leicester is a tragic example of how the fast-fashion industry creates exploitation across the world.
The scandalous mistreatment of workers in my community is best understood as an extreme microcosm of the national and global decay of workers’ rights during the failed neoliberal project of the last 40 years.

CLAUDIA WEBBE argues that Labour gains nothing from its adoption of right-wing stances on immigration, and seems instead to be deliberately paving the way for the far right to become an established force in British politics, as it has already in Europe

The Met Police arrested a staggering 890 people, many elderly, disabled, and even blind in a single demonstration — all to back up the government’s unhinged campaign against non-violent civil disobedience at the behest of Israel, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE

CLAUDIA WEBBE says a UN agency’s finding that Gaza’s famine, killing up to 400 people a day, is entirely man-made must prompt a renewed revolt against our government’s complicity in this horror

Starmer’s decision to suspend Diane Abbott yet again demonstrates a determination to maintain and propagate a hierarchy of racism, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE