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

SHADOW chancellor John McDonnell made a number of important announcements at the 2018 Labour Party conference on the subject of industry.
He has said that Labour will give workers in the private sector shares in their business, limited to £500 personally, the remainder to be used to invest in public services. He has also argued that there should be a significant number of workers on company boards, with the proviso that they are trade union members.
Given the unfortunate decline in trade union influence (by no means irreversible) and the power of the large private-sector companies like Amazon and Google, McDonnell’s policies ,if radical by recent standards, are also modest.

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