Bill Carmichael: Blame socialism for Venezuela's ruin

Where is this? Nazi Germany? Soviet Russia? Present day North Korea? No, this is the socialist paradise of Venezuela where the far left president Nicolas Maduro has just won a rigged referendum and is well on the way to becoming South America’s latest blood-soaked dictator.

The decline of Venezuela from a thriving democracy into failed state characterised by the direst poverty and pitiless political repression is one of the most remarkable stories of our age.

Not long ago the country was the richest in South America, blessed with natural resources that should guarantee the prosperity of every citizen. Oil reserves, for example, are the largest in the world. But in just a few short years Venezuela’s economy has been reduced to smoking ruins. GDP has shrunk by almost 20 per cent in a year, debts have spiralled out of control and inflation – by some estimates more than 800 per cent – is the highest in the world.

Last year infant mortality rose by 30 per cent, maternal mortality by 65 per cent and cases of malaria jumped 65 per cent. Almost 30 per cent of children are malnourished. President Maduro has responded by ordering huge increases in the minimum wage – but as many people are unemployed it hasn’t made much difference. And even if you are lucky enough to earn a wage, the shelves in the government-run supermarkets are empty and there is no food or medicines to buy.

People have been reduced – quite literally – to sifting through piles of rubbish in an effort to find enough rotting fruit and vegetables to eat. With the black humour of an oppressed people many have attributed their dramatic weight loss to the “Maduro Diet”.

Meanwhile, anyone who complains about this state of affairs is thrown into prison without trial. Gangs of pro-government thugs, known as the “Colectivos”, have murdered hundreds of peaceful demonstrators.

So how on earth did this happen? How did a country blessed by so many natural advantages end up as one of the poorest nations on the planet comparable to the Third World’s worst basket cases?

The answer is staring you in the face and can be entirely summed up by a single word – socialism. We shouldn’t be the least surprised at what has happened to Venezuela because similar tragedies have happened many times before.

Venezuela has followed that well trodden socialist path to ruin made earlier by Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Zimbabwe, East Germany, Cambodia, North Korea and Cuba.

Because when a country adopts a socialist system two things invariably happen: 1. The economy collapses causing widespread poverty. 2. When ordinary people complain about this they are imprisoned, tortured or shot. Yet we never seem to learn. Socialism has been tried many times in the past, and if Jeremy Corbyn gets his way, it will be tried again here in the UK in the future.

Every single time it has been tried it has ended in miserable failure, causing widespread penury and wholesale abuses of human rights. But no regime is so vile that it won’t find supporters in the West. Even while Stalin was shooting people in droves and starving millions of people to death, “useful idiots” such as George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb continued to sing Russia’s praises.

And up to very recently today’s “useful idiots” positively drooled over Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution.

Corbyn himself said Venezuela was proof “there is a different and better way of doing things – it is called socialism”.

His spin doctor Seamus Milne said Venezuela represented a “new form of socialist politics” that offered an alternative to a “failed neo-liberal system”. Diane Abbott cooed that Venezuela showed “another way is possible”. As the country descends into bloody chaos these songs of praise have become a bit muted, replaced in the main by an embarrassed silence.

Corbyn is under some pressure, according to reports, to distance himself from Maduro’s regime. It is a bit late for that now – we all know where his sympathies lie. And the next time some left-winger tells you that socialism offers a better future, just remember the devastation that failed political philosophy has wreaked on the poor people of Venezuela and vow never to let that happen in our own country.