The brutal reality of Corbyn’s utopia

SPARE a thought today for the desperate, beleaguered people of Venezuela – the nation lauded by Jeremy Corbyn as a socialist utopia.

In less than 20 years, the hard-Left governments of Hugo Chavez, and now Nicolas Maduro, have dragged what was once among the richest nations in Latin America into a nightmarish spiral of crippling debt, political violence, rampant corruption and an almost inconceivable 14,000 per cent hyperinflation.

A million people have fled the country and many who remain are starving, as the minimum wage has been crushed to less than two dollars a month. Armed gangs have been sweeping the cities on motorcycles beating, abducting and killing political opponents. In this Marxist paradise, all dissent is ruthlessly crushed.

And to make their misery complete, a patently rigged election has now put Maduro and his thugs back in power until at least 2024.

Let’s not forget, this is the country that Mr Corbyn said ‘showed us there is a different and better way of doing things’. Even now, his equally deluded Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell refuses to accept that socialism has failed in Venezuela.

In an extraordinary BBC interview, he said the answer to that nation’s problems was not less socialism – but more socialism. In normal times, this kind of insane Alice In Wonderland logic would be risible.

But with Labour and the Tories neck and neck in the polls and the prospect of a disastrous Marxist government in this country becoming all too real – it’s no laughing matter.