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

DURING one of the few TV election debates Boris Johnson did manage to appear in, Jeremy Corbyn said that he would give Johnson a copy of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol as a Christmas present.
Needless to say this got the Daily Telegraph going. Melanie McDonagh opined that there was nothing socialist about Dickens or about the book in particular.
She was certainly right about that but as several comments underlined she had failed to grasp the point that Dickens, and indeed Corbyn, was actually making.

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