Corbyn’s fallen idols

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 economy needed to diversify away from oil, he suggested, adding: ‘but we also have to recognise that there have been effective and serious attempts at reducing poverty, improving literacy and improving the lives of the poorest people’. It is hard to believe that he was speaking about a country where, according to the IMF, the economy shrank last year by 8 per cent, inflation hit 481 per cent, unemployment was 17 per cent, and where malnutrition is now widespread. Jeremy Corbyn has become a latter-day Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter who in 1932 won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of glowing reports from Stalin’s Soviet Union which turned a blind eye to its manufactured famine.

It is impossible to embark on a fair discussion about Venezuela’s problems without acknowledging the disastrous economic experiment to which the country has been subjected under the leadership of the late Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro. The economic problems did not begin when Chavez was elected president in 1999; the country had already declined since 1970, when it had a higher income per capita than Spain and was among the world’s ten richest countries.