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

ONE of the two contenders for the Tory leadership has threatened to further restrict the activities of trade unions, an enduring obsession of the Thatcherite right.
The detail is inevitably lacking, but Liz Truss wants “minimum service levels” where public-sector workers have balloted for a legal strike. The implications of this are deeply concerning — even if probably not fully thought through by Truss’s team.
RMT leader Mick Lynch, writing in the Daily Mirror, argued that Truss wants to go back to 1871, the date of the Act that legalised trade unions. TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady has warned of a fundamental attack on the right to organise and an assault on democracy as understood across Europe.

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