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

While pundits concentrate on noisy clashes between Donald Trump and Angela Merkel in Brussels, few have noticed that Colombia is joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) as a “global partner,” the first Latin American country to do so.
In doing so, it joins eight other “global partner” countries in Nato: Afghanistan, Australia, Iraq, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, New Zealand and Pakistan.
Colombia has been seeking to join Nato since 2006. As a stepping stone, it signed an information sharing and security agreement in 2013 and in 2017 a partnership and co-operation programme.



