Hooray for Hugo

After giving last year’s award to worthy women’s rights activists, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee seem to have rediscovered their sense of ironic black humour. They haven’t quite managed to top their 2009 masterstroke, when Barack Obama got the nod for his work in spreading goodwill and understanding by escalating wars and terrorising whole populations with killer drones, but giving the medal to the European Union, at a time when EU macroeconomic policy is spreading fear and despair through much of the continent, does come a close second.

It’s been rather a depressing week all round, from a left point of view, what with Romney making up ground in the US and our own Tory government promising all-out class warfare. There was a bright spot though; Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution marches on in Venezuela. Chavez has his critics on the left round here – proletarian bonapartism is a phrase one sometimes hears – but his record of improving the lot of the poor beats anything we’ve managed in the last half century, so more power to his elbow I say.