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ROBERT COLVILE
How the Chavez socialist experiment in Venezuela cheered on by Jeremy Corbyn turned South America’s richest country into a hellhole
A NO-DEAL Brexit, we keep being told, will savage Britain’s economy.
GDP growth will stall. Taxes will rise. We’ll even run out of Mars bars.
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But across the Atlantic, something has been happening that should give us all some perspective.
Over the past decade, Venezuela has plunged into the abyss — but there’s been no civil war, no earthquakes or hurricanes.
Just a brutal, corrupt government that has turned what was once Latin America’s richest country into a hellhole.
Starvation rations plunged millions into hunger and malnutrition, with some resorting to eating dogs, cats, even zoo animals.
People got into knife fights over the right to scavenge from a dumpster.
Its economy is more than three times smaller than in 2011. Inflation climbed into the thousands, then millions of per cent.
The result has been a refugee crisis on the scale of the Syria conflict.
No wonder tens of thousands of people took to the streets of the capital Caracas this week, declaring national assembly head Juan Guaido the legitimate president.
All this is awful for the poor bloody Venezuelans.
But what does it have to do with Britain?
BRITAIN'S 'CHAVISTAS'
The answer is that Venezuela wasn’t just a disaster. It was an experiment — cheered on by Jeremy Corbyn and his cronies.
In 1999, Hugo Chavez took over Venezuela.
He ruled until his death in 2013, when he was succeeded by his hand-picked protege Nicolas Maduro.
Chavez modelled himself on Latin American revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Simon Bolivar. He nationalised much of the oil industry — which dominates the Venezuelan economy — and imposed punitive taxes on foreign firms.
He introduced price controls and later currency controls. He declared “economic war” on the “stateless bourgeoisie” and seized the goods of private companies he denounced as saboteurs.
For Corbyn, the Chavez regime was an inspiration — a chance to see true socialism brought to life.
Venezuela, Corbyn has said, “showed us that there is a different, and a better, way of doing things. It’s called socialism”.
It wasn’t just Corbyn. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott and Corbyn’s media chief Seumas Milne have all praised the Venezuelan revolution.
That “better way of doing things” has ruined tens of millions of lives but there has not been a hint of an apology from Corbyn.
Normally, the fact that people are taking to the streets to free themselves of a vicious regime would be cheered to the rafters by the Left.
Instead, there is the silence of those who find themselves hideously embarrassed.
The few who are not staring at their shoes claim that Venezuela has been the victim of an American plot.
That Maduro took, in McDonnell’s words, a “wrong turn” from Chavez’s true socialism.
That it was all down to a falling oil price.
Yes, Maduro took a wrong turn. But that turn was to follow the path laid out by Chavez.
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From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, there is a long and shabby history of British left-wingers acclaiming a workers’ paradise — only to declare, once its failure is clear, that it wasn’t really socialist after all.
Never mind the millions of lives ruined — let’s have another go!
If he became Prime Minister, Corbyn might not succeed in turning Britain into Venezuela. But we’d be Caracas to let him try.
- Robert Colvile is director of the Centre For Policy Studies.
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