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 several thousand people who gathered in Parliament Square on the evening of Friday January 31 appeared from all the pictures that I saw to be mainly men of a certain age.
How can we characterise such a crowd? It was certainly not one of protest, since the object was to mark the departure of Britain from the EU, which was something achieved by the current Conservative government.
It may have had aspects of the mob to it, but reports suggest it simply dispersed fairly peacefully at the end of proceedings.

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