The plan involves lopping five zeroes off the currency, the bolivar, and tying it to a cryptocurrency which in turn is supposedly tied to Venezuela’s oil wealth. The minimum wage will be jacked up by 3,000 per cent and the wage bills of small businesses subsidised by the government for the next three months. In other words, Maduro is promising more of the same fiddling and fixing which brought the economy to its knees in the first place.

It is impossible to dissociate the Venezuelan crisis from the very economic measures Corbyn praises. Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez, whom Corbyn described as an “inspiration to all of us fighting back against neoliberalism and austerity in Europe”, fixed prices for food, toiletries and other essentials, and subsidised oil sales to the extent that a gallon of petrol cost less than the equivalent of a US cent.

The price caps and subsidies made life easier for a while but undermined many Venezuelan industries, which lost their incentive to produce. As shops emptied, goods could only be found at much higher prices on the black market and inflation grew rampant. The collapse in oil prices in 2014 intensified the problems, but the underlying stresses in the economy were already there.