Sir Keir Starmer‘s initial squirming reaction to the US strike on Venezuela is rooted in the long love affair the Left has enjoyed with the basket-case communist country.
Fearful of angering the US President, but also conscious of his party’s veneration of Nicolas Maduro’s failed regime, the Prime Minister was reduced to saying that he wanted to ‘establish the facts, and take it from there’.
He told the BBC: ‘I’ve been a lifelong advocate of international law’, before tiptoeing along a diplomatic tightrope by calling the relationship between the US and the UK ‘vitally important for our defence, for our security, for our intelligence. It is my responsibility to make sure that relationship works.’
Privately, officials are more forthright. One diplomat told The Mail on Sunday: ‘We know the US had wargamed the ‘decapitation’ of the Venezuelan regime, and the simulation predicted chaos. This is a recipe for anarchy, but in No 10 they seem paralysed – basically just sitting there and saying, ‘What the f***?’ They should be calling for the United Nations to oversee an election there now.’
Later last night, Sir Keir aligned more closely with Mr Trump by saying: ‘We regarded Maduro as an illegitimate president and we shed no tears about the end of his regime’. But he knows the Left of his party has long admired the communist regime and hated Mr Trump.
Jeremy Corbyn took inspiration from Venezuelan policies of public ownership and price controls when he led Labour into the general elections of 2017 and 2019.
Mr Corbyn once described Maduro’s predecessor, the notorious Hugo Chavez, as ‘an inspiration to all of us fighting back against austerity and neo-liberal economics’. When Chavez died in 2013, Mr Corbyn attended a vigil and thanked him for ‘showing the poor matter and wealth can be shared’.
But Chavez’s hardline Marxism led to empty shelves, power cuts and the suppression of human rights and free speech. More than a million people fled the country, with some of those who remained so hungry they were reduced to eating cats.
Sir Keir knows that the left of his party has always admired the communist dictatorship – and hated Trump
Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro was captured by US military
President Donald Trump standing near CIA Director John Ratcliffe as they watch the U.S. military operation in Venezuela
Last November, Mr Corbyn was one of a number of left-wing European politicians, including Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and Labour MP Richard Burgon, who warned against ‘the imminent threat of US military intervention in Venezuela
Once the richest nation in South America, Venezuela seized the assets of foreign oil producers and redirected profits into social programmes, causing the collapse of the oil industry, hyperinflation and the destruction of the tax base required to fund public services.
Maduro continued the same economically illiterate dictatorship. By last year, inflation had hit 230 per cent, with the economy having shrunk by 75 per cent since 2012.
In November, Mr Corbyn warned against US military intervention in Venezuela and the Maduro government was delighted.
Now interim leader of the shambolic Your Party, Mr Corbyn called the attack ‘unprovoked and illegal… a brazen attempt to secure control over Venezuelan natural resources. It is an act of war that puts the lives of millions of people at risk and should be condemned.’
