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

EDUCATION has been a feature of the Tory leadership race. Given the age of the party’s electorate, both candidates are talking about the great grand-children of those voting.
Liz Truss has complained that the comprehensive school she went to in Leeds, Roundhay, did not provide a good education.
However she ended up at Oxford. Rishi Sunak, who went to Winchester College, a rival to Eton, has argued that universities are about “earnings potential” and the focus must be on subjects in that area.

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