Aiding corruption

THIS was the week in which Jeremy Corbyn’s silence on his socialist utopia of Venezuela spoke volumes. Opposition politicians were taken from their homes at night, more than 100 protesters were killed on the streets and the regime continued its descent into dictatorship.

Does the Labour leader simply have no answer as to why the country he praised to the hilt for years has collapsed into ruins? Or perhaps he shares the views of his old ally Ken Livingstone, who said the civil unrest was avoidable if only Nicolas Maduro had killed ‘all the oligarchs’.

Now, with depressing predictability, it emerges Britain’s hard-pressed taxpayers are funding aid spending of £6million in... Venezuela! And, in a bitter irony, some of the money was used to train the very security forces now leading a brutal crackdown.

This raises one very serious question for ministers. How corrupt, mismanaged and undemocratic does a country have to be before they turn off the aid taps?