Venezuela must be a warning to socialists
The crisis in Venezuela is a damning indictment of socialism. On paper, it promises equality and justice. In practice, it delivers poverty and authoritarianism. Its failure in Venezuela was entirely predictable, because the more radical the socialist theory, the more dreadful its reality is. For the people of that particular country, it now spells misery. For the people of Britain, this is a warning. The Labour Party is currently run by men and women who regard Venezuela as a model. What you see happening there is what Labour would do here.
Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998 by a population sick of corruption and inequality. His solution was to plough oil revenues into social programmes. Even in the good years, Venezuela ran a deficit; when the price of oil fell, the country quickly ran out of money. Rather than accept austerity, the regime doubled down. Currency controls were implemented and prices fixed.
In one of his interminable television broadcasts, Chavez appeared in a mock kitchen to show off subsidised refrigerators imported from China: he crossed out the “capitalist” price tag and wrote a “Chavez discount” in its place. Chavez died in 2013, excusing him from witnessing the worst consequences of his policies: debt, hyper-inflation, a health crisis and hunger. The Catholic aid agency Caritas reports that at least one in 10 children suffer from either “moderate or severe acute malnutrition”. Catholic bishops recently appealed to the Virgin Mary to “save our country from communism”.
The people rebelled and the regime fought back, proving that the only way to enforce the kind of radical equality sought in Venezuela is with fists. The Supreme Court was stuffed, critical media was put under control, human rights activists were expelled from the country and opposition candidates were intimidated or even arrested. Throughout all of this, the Chavistas insisted that their system would be free of tyranny so long as they upheld the country’s constitution – until, as if exhausted by lying, they finally announced a referendum to rewrite the constitution. The results were blatantly fixed.
Venezuela’s direction has been obvious for over a decade. This is an important point: it means that any British socialist who praised Chavez or Nicolás Maduro, his successor, did so knowing full well that those men were crafting an autocracy.
Not everyone on the Left jumped on the bandwagon. Labour MP Chris Bryant recalls that when he was taken on a tour of a Venezuelan model hospital in 2009, the fraud was obvious: one so-called patient appeared in three different wards. But there are members of the Labour front bench who were fans of Chavez, including John Mcdonnell and Diane Abbott. Ken Livingstone, a friend and ally of Jeremy Corbyn, dismissed the horror stories as US “propaganda”. As for the Labour leader himself, in 2013, Mr Corbyn described Chavez as “an inspiration to all of us fighting back against austerity and neoliberal economics in Europe”.
What Mr Corbyn thinks about Venezuela today we do not know, because he has decided not to comment. Given that he is leader of the Opposition and wants to become prime minister, it is not unreasonable to ask what he thinks about the catastrophic failure of a country he once held up as “an inspiration”. His silence speaks for itself.
The Labour leadership are fellow travellers with the gangsters in Caracas. They, too, see life as a class conflict; America as a great Satan, and the sins of those who oppose it as pardonable; and redistribution of wealth as the ultimate goal of politics, even if it leaves the people without any money. There is an exception to the last rule: the children of comrades are to enjoy every privilege they wish. Chavez’s daughter is reportedly a billionaire. This is a more lavish version of the old certainty that the harder Left a British socialist is, the more likely they are to send their children to a grammar school or even to put them on the payroll. In the socialist “paradise”, some people are always more equal than others.
Any British socialist who praised Chavez or his successor did so knowing they were crafting an autocracy