Venezuela

Wednesday

Catherine Addington

Venezuela’s doomed love affair with socialism continues

It’s hard to imagine now but just decades ago Venezuela was the richest country in South America. The late President Hugo Chávez’s social programs thrived on record oil revenues; Venezuelan industry was left underdeveloped but poverty was glitteringly – yet only temporarily – relieved. Now that the price of oil has plummeted, the country’s hollow economy is dependent on imports it does not have the cash to buy. Normally reliable Chinese lenders are having second thoughts. Inflation has hit triple digits. Venezuela’s economy is in utter recession and is projected to contract eight per cent this year, making it officially the slowest-growing economy in the world. The litany of consequent disasters is

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 22 June 2016

Home One week before the United Kingdom voted in a referendum on membership of the European Union, Jo Cox, a Labour MP and married mother of two, aged 41, died after being shot and stabbed at Birstall, West Yorkshire, on her way to a constituency surgery. A passer-by, Bernard Kenny, a retired miner aged 77, tried to protect her and was wounded. A constituent, Thomas Mair, aged 52, was charged with her murder and, on being asked his name in a magistrates’ court, said: ‘Death to traitors. Freedom for Britain.’ Parliament was recalled the following Monday so that tributes could be made. The Crown Prosecution Service said that Sir Cliff Richard

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Age concern | 21 January 2016

Daniel Barenboim back at the Festival Hall! Cue The Grand March of the Musical Luvvies Across Hungerford Bridge, a bustling overture by Karl Jenkins in which a trombone farts out the epigrams of Simon Callow and the violas mimic the gentle swing of David Mellor’s shoulder-length bob — modelled, I’m told, on Anna Ford’s barnet c.1982. Jolly fine it looked, too, on Sunday night. Barenboim doesn’t have much hair these days, but baldness suits him. Sixty years after his RFH debut, as a 13-year-old playing Mozart under Joseph Krips, he has the same baby-pink skin as Winston Churchill in old age. He also shares Churchill’s belief in his own indestructibility.

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 19 March 2015

Home In a Budget intended to have ‘no gimmicks, no giveaways’, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, offered pensioners with annuities the chance to cash them in and blow the lot. Borrowing in the coming year would be a fraction of a billion less than feared and the annual deficit was to be eliminated by 2019. The income tax personal allowance was raised. Business rates were to be reviewed. Duty on beer, cider and spirits came down a touch, but not on wine. A higher bank levy was predicted to raise £900 million. North Sea oil and gas producers were offered tax reductions. About 15 million people would have to

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 12 March 2015

Home Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, said that ‘a huge burden of responsibility’ lay with those who acted as apologists for those who committed acts of terror. Parliament approved new obligations for passenger carriers to restrict the travel to or from Britain of people named as a terrorist threat. The Charity Commission required the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Roddick Foundation to give unequivocal assurances that they had ceased funding Cage, the advocacy group known for speaking up for Mohammed Emwazi, the British jihadist involved in videos of Islamic State murders. England were knocked out of the Cricket World Cup. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, found himself

Thursday

Ed West

Never mind Ukip’s immigration policy, Britain has an emigration problem

Ukip has unveiled its new Aussie-style immigration policy, just a week after the latest bad immigration news for the government. The news was bad only in a sense, as high immigration levels are a symptom of a healthy economy; after all, the Venezuelan government doesn’t break into a sweat every time the immigration figures come in, thanks to the genius of Chavenomics. But it’s all bad news for the Tories because most people would like restrictions on the rate of population growth, and of immigration-led social change, and the government made promises it clearly couldn’t keep. Yet the British economy is doing well and Ukip realise therefore that there is a

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

You realise how little you know of anybody when they die

Whether or not you believe in the afterlife, death remains an impenetrable mystery. One moment a person is making jokes and comments and observations about life; the next he is gone. What has happened to that store of wit and wisdom acquired over a lifetime, to that particular way of understanding and looking at things, to that unique muddle of thoughts and feelings that every individual has? Even if someone has gone to heaven, it is difficult to imagine that he has taken these things with him. If he did, they would hardly be compatible with eternal rest. By my brother John’s bedside when he died, aged 87, on New

Friday

Ed West

Hugo Chavez – the ballet

Here’s something to watch next time you’re visiting Venezuela, if you can avoid getting murdered while you’re there – a ballet based on the life of the glorious late president Hugo Chavez: ‘The piece, From Spider-Seller to Liberator, is roughly based on a series of personal reminiscences culled from the late president’s speeches and his weekly TV show Aló Presidente. A team of Cuban journalists combed through thousands of hours, selecting the folksy childhood anecdotes which he would drop in among state decrees and political announcements. The work begins with a recording of Chávez’s voice saying: “I was like a seed which fell on hard ground,” before a female character

Saturday

James Bloodworth

Venezuela: a shining example of how not to help the poor

No serious person today views the Cuban Revolution as anything other than an impoverished tyranny – up to and including the leaders of that Revolution, who have been hastily turning toward capitalism since learning in 2009 that the island was on the brink of insolvency. It remains much easier to find useful idiots willing to defend Venezuela’s so-called ‘Bolivarian revolution’, however, which until recently was supposed to promise something better than its ossified Caribbean neighbour. Not for much longer, perhaps; for Venezuela is on the brink of a social explosion after 15 years of economic incompetence by Islington’s favourite petrocrat. It was reported this week that, absurdly, the most oil

Thursday

Ben Hamilton

A Bright Moon for Fools, by Jasper Gibson – review

Harry Christmas, the central character of this bitterly funny debut novel, is a middle- aged, overweight alcoholic, with no friends and no prospects. After marrying a woman and running off with her money, he flies to Venezuela. He justifies this in two ways, the first sentimental, the second pragmatic. He wants to visit the country of his deceased first wife’s family, and he wants to escape the Rot. The Rot can be defined as everything that Christmas doesn’t like about England (or, we soon learn, about the world in general). This turns out to be a long and varied list. He despises the indoor smoking ban and sport, but he

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Hugo Chavez: A Clown Masquerading As A Threat

As would-be dictators go, Hugo Chavez was on the clownish end of the repressive spectrum. By the end, however, the joke was wearing thin. He was, as Rory Carroll aptly describes him, an “elected autocrat”. But if you judge a man by the company he keeps, Chavez’s legacy takes a darker turn. In the name of sticking-it-to-the-man (that is, the United States) Chavez chummed himself to most of the world’s ghastliest leaders. And, of course, his hero and father-figure was Fidel Castro, governor of the world’s sunniest island gulag. Meanwhile, in Britain and Ireland, his death has been mourned by George Galloway (who deems Chavez a “modern day Spartacus”), Ken