Socialism had failed yet again, this time in Venezuela. It has failed there just as it has failed in Cuba, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Africa and elsewhere. In Venezuela the policies of the Chavez and then the Maduro governments of price controls on staple goods and centrally planning the economy, have brought nothing but misery to Venezuelan citizens. The socialists of Venezuela thought that they could buy their way to socialist nirvana by dint of high oil prices but failed to take into account that the value of assets like oil reserves can go down as well as up.

The response of Venezuela’s socialists has not been to admit that their policies have been a failure and make necessary changes to these policies to stabilise the nation’s economy and governance, which is what they should have done. Instead the socialist government has doubled down and imposed more socialism and more oppression on Venezuela’s long suffering people.

The result of this intransigence and oppression has been that Venezuela has been turned into a basket case of a country despite sitting on significant oil reserves and a relatively well educated populace. Socialism has turned Venezuela into a country where people eat from rubbish bins and where the International Monetary Fund predicts that the annual inflation rate will reach 1m percent. Just as it was in the old German Weimar Republic and in Zimbabwe, hyperinflation has meant that their currency, the Bolivar, is quite frankly not worth the paper it is printed on.

The Chavez and Maduro governments of Venezuela have ruled that benighted country with an iron fist and extreme incompetence. They spunked money from Venezuela’s oil reserves on socialist policies that were unsustainable and beat down opposition. They have behaved, like all socialist governments end up behaving, as tyrants.

However, there are signs that things are changing and that the people of Venezuela have had enough of eating out of bins, killing their pets for food, attending hospitals with no medicines whilst being told by the government how wonderful their socialist ‘utopia’ is. There is both a political and street opposition growing in Venezuela now and it is challenging the government. Governments and blocs of nations across the world are starting to challenge Venezuela’s socialist wreckers. The European Union, the USA and Great Britain have criticised the Venezuelan government and the governments of Israel and Australia have recognised opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president instead of Maduro. Mr Guaido has also called on Britain to hang on to gold reserves held by the UK and not transfer them back to Venezuela as this gold could allow the socialists to survive any forthcoming sanctions on Venezuela. The very last thing that the people of this suffering nation need is to be under the jackboot of socialism any longer than necessary and starving the Maduro regime of funds may well be the best way to do that.

It is quite plain that whatever happens over the next few months, the Venezuelan people are in for a period of uncertainty as moves are made both within and without Venezuela to get rid of the failed socialist regime. It is to be hoped that whatever government that replaces the socialists, runs the country in a better way than they have done.

Venezuelan socialism has collapsed as many expected it to do and this collapse is going to have some blowback not so much in Venezuela itself, after all what could be worse than their current government of socialist incompetents, but among the Western Left that has supported the Chavez and Maduro governments. The exposing of Venezuelan socialism as the utter failure that it was destined to be will severely embarrass the likes of UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn who has been very vocal in his support of Venezuelan socialism.

Jeremy Corbyn and other high profile mainstream Left wingers in Britain have held up Venezuela as an example of socialism that works. They have used Venezuela today just as earlier generations of socialists used the early Soviet Union as a way to lie to people and say ‘I have seen the future and it works’. Corbyn has praised the Chavez government as one that brought Venezuelan citizens out of poverty even though the socialists in Venezuela were driving the country into the ground. Corbyn’s ultra Left spin doctor Seamus Milne has lavished praise on Maduro despite Maduro being little more than yet another socialist tyrant. Corbyn has given the distinct impression that he would like to see Britain run along the same lines as socialist Venezuela has been run, something that should give British voters the extreme collywobbles. After all do we really want to be run by a man like Corbyn who admires a regime that has brought so much misery to its own people? I know I do not and hopefully Corbyn’s fascination with supporting Venezuelan socialism will be another nail in the coffin of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

It is highly likely that we are going to see some change, hopefully positive change, in Venezuela over the next few months. I hope that as well as bringing a better time for the Venezuelan people, that the collapse of Venezuelan socialism will also see Britons challenging the Labour Party and the appalling habit that its leaders have had of praising and using as a role model the tyrants that have brought this South American country to such a low point. I pray that we are seeing not just the end of Venezuelan socialism but also the admiration for such socialism in the West.