Reminders of Philip Hammond warning of Cuba and Venezuela-style food shortages under a Jeremy Corbyn government have been circulating today as UK supermarkets impose purchase limits on fruit and veg.
The former chancellor used the Conservative Party’s 2017 conference to raise the spectre of failed socialist states around the world as he branded Labour’s economic plans a “political version of Jurassic Park”.
Speaking in Manchester, he claimed “Corbyn’s Marxist policies will inevitably lead us back to where Britain was in the late 1970s”.
And he also made an “appeal to geography”, pointing to the desperate plight of countries that rejected market economics in favour of socialism.
“Like Cuba, which I visited last year as Foreign Secretary, where curiously, I found cows in the fields but no milk in the shops.
“Or Zimbabwe – once, one of the most productive and prosperous countries on the continent but after decades of socialism, not so much a breadbasket, as a basket case.
“And Venezuela, a country rich beyond imagination in natural resources but where the economic policies of Hugo Chavez, publicly supported by Jeremy Corbyn, have so tragically impoverished the country that it can longer feed its people and inflation is over 1,000 per cent and growth this year will fall for the fourth year in a row.”
The Chancellor claimed Labour’s “failed ideas, dredged up from a bygone era” threatened “not only our economic progress but our freedom as well”.
“A party taken hostage by a clique of hard-left extremist infiltrators people who despise our values and talk down our country,” he said.
The comments have been posted as national food shortages, rampant inflation and threats of 1970s-style blackouts hit Britain under the Conservative government.