Deputy Dawgs: Cruddas and Chavez as Comrades

With all the tooing and froing over Jon Cruddas' real estate and school choices a storm in a tea cup in the backwaters of the award winning Tory blogosphere has escaped much notice.

Here at last Cruddas will score some deeper appreciation from the left and centre left, if not immediately winning any Brownie points.

The quiet storm is over his signing of a letter to the Guardian supporting Hugo Chavez's recent action to protect the democracy of his country from a media insurgency. Prague Tory and his chums apply a strangely detached protocol to all this. I ask them rhetorically whether a British government would tolerate the same.

They come out with some libertarian tosh. And I go again:

My question was of course rhetorical for the UK, and for the UK I might well accept that some kind of The Day-to-Day meets Tiswas fronted by Nick Griffin and Margaret Hodge and calling for a broomstick rebellion, a military putsch and a following fascist dictatorship could be tolerated as absurd.
However in Venezuela the question is real and elected leaders of whatever politics cannot yet afford the luxury of being media libertarians.
In Prague Tory and his cadre's hatred of lefties they are I think completely missing the point. Which is that IN VENEZUELA at the moment no democratically elected (and let's be honest extremely popular with the broad population) politician could tolerate sponsored uprisings with foreign support AND unfettered propaganda.
The foreign support is hard to deal with but unfettered destructive propaganda is possible.
I'm no expert on Venezuela but I do think it is pointless using London Tory values to crow about this.

Meanwhile the website of the embassy of the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela gives some more useful perspectives:

The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, says: "For many years people have demanded that social progress and democracy go hand in hand, and that is exactly what is now taking place in Venezuela. It therefore deserves the unequivocal support of not only every supporter of social progress but every genuine believer in democracy in the world".

And also there my own MP Tony Lloyd who is Chair of the All Party Venezuela Group: "The history of Latin America in recent times gravely illustrates that policies which seek to isolate and demonise sovereign nations only serve to radicalise governments and opposition groups, creating a situation of extreme polarisation and high instability. This cannot be in the UK's national interest"