Venezuela

Once upon a time Venezuela was talked up by British socialists – from John McDonnell to Richard Burgon – as an example of a better way. As Jeremy Corbyn put it back in 2013: ‘Chavez showed us that there is a different and better way of doing things. It’s called socialism, it’s called social justice and it’s something that Venezuela has made a big step towards.’ Only ever since there were mass food shortages and toilet paper rations – with 82pc of households living in poverty – the majority of Corbynistas have gone a little quiet on the subject. However, as Chavez’s successor President Nicolás Maduro faces a political crisis amid mass

Imagine if Theresa May suddenly announced that her government was going to devalue the pound by 96 per cent; increase the minimum wage by 6,000 per cent; pay the wage increases for millions of businesses for three months; tie the pound to a mythical cryptocurrency; prepared for petrol rationing; and impose a 0.7 per cent tax on big financial transactions. It would be seen either as an act of lunacy, of a collapsing country — or both. For the long-suffering people of Venezuela, it’s just the latest stage of their country’s grand socialist experiment. President Nicolás Maduro has just issued a new currency, called ‘sovereign bolivars’. The original idea was

Although the local elections saw the Conservatives do better than expected, there is a sense that the Tories are not out of the woods yet when it comes to defeating Jeremy Corbyn at the next election. In that vein, last night the Centre for Policy Studies’ ‘New Blue: Ideas for a New Generation’ launch, with Ben Bradley and Michael Gove. The Defra Secretary gave the keynote speech and used it to say it wasn’t enough for his party to bang on about Venezuela and then expect the problem of socialism to go away: ‘Simply to rely on a few tired arguments about what has happened in Venezuela, heart rending though the

Despite admitting in an interview in this morning’s edition of the Morning Star that he was ‘no bloody expert on Venezuela’, Chris Williamson, the Labour MP for Derby North, made it quite clear this afternoon who he believes is to blame for the socialist country’s problems – and it most certainly isn’t Maduro’s socialist government. Speaking at a Solidarity with Venezuela fringe event at Labour conference, Williamson described how the country – a place where women now exchange sex for nappies for their babies and where the capital city is the most murderous city on earth – was undoubtedly witnessing ‘difficult and tough times’ and that ‘mistakes had been made’.

The victims of foreign dictatorships have become chips in our political games. In our corner of the rich world, for instance, the suffering of Venezuela matters only because Jeremy’s Corbyn’s enemies can use it to attack his support for the Chavist regime when it was unchallengeable, and his cowardly equivocation when the inevitable catastrophe followed. Saudi Arabia matters only because leftists can use it to damn the British establishment’s bootlicking support for the House of Saud and its suppression of democratic, women’s and minority rights. Yet the smallest concern of the Venezuelans is the praise the western far left lavished on their corrupt and massively incompetent dictators. I don’t mean

Jeremy Corbyn finally broke his silence on Venezuela this week, but in the manner of a man who has his head buried in a very large bucket of sand. He condemned violence ‘on both sides’, painting the country’s problems as a battle between factions rather than a case of a repressive government snuffing out popular protests. No one would know from the Labour leader’s words that President Maduro’s regime is engaged in what the UN Human Rights Office described this week as a ‘widespread and systematic use of excessive force’. More revealing still was Corbyn’s reply when prodded on the economic and social conditions which led to the protests. The