We’ve been here before.
For the second time, one inevitability has followed another. The electors of Barbados hand an unprecedented mandate to a political party that shuts dissenting voices out of Parliament.
Then, shortly after the honeymoon period ends, a lawmaker spies a vacant constitutional post (the Leader of the Opposition is a part of the governance structure of our adversarial parliamentary system and as such is an official part of our Government).
The lone dissenter becomes the leader of a one-person party, like some parliamentary black sheep, seeking comfort in the bosom of a pair of senate colleagues. They are sincere, earnest and passionate and we do not doubt their forthrightness.
But as Mark Twain reputedly observed: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”.
So, as we asked of the previous occupant of the chair, we do so now of the latest maverick: What besides your personal fortunes will you change?
We ask this now of Senior Counsel Ralph Thorne. We know citizen Thorne and he is an honourable man. As an advocate on Coleridge Street, he has proven himself determined to seek justice for his clients in the tradition of our very best barristers. We do not buy his declaration that democracy is in any greater peril than it has ever been under the powerful gravitational pull of a single political force called the Prime Minister of Barbados. ‘Twas ever thus.
We have the benefit of a long historical memory to observe that dissent in Barbados is as traditional as macaroni pie. Nobody pays taxes for Bajans’ mouths. Witness the violent disagreement between the Young Turks of the Barbados Labour Party who squirmed for three years under the leviathan will of Sir Grantley Adams that led to them forming the Democratic Labour Party. So it will not be any of today’s 30 men and women, whether a lowly backbencher, minister, or the First Among Equals who will pose any threat to Barbadian democracy that our ancestors toiled, fought, bled, cried and died for.
For democracy is a consent thing: we are only governed and live in “a nation of laws, not of men” (or women) to the extent that we so agree. The customs officer at the port, the civil servant at the till, the police officer at the traffic stop, the sailor on the high seas – and the elector with his pencil and ballot paper – only when we the people of this nation give up our long-cherished democratic ideals that democracy will be wiped from the face of the nation.
In every age of our modern political life, there has been dissent and fracture and departure by individuals claiming to act on their conscience. At no point in our young political history do we count these individuals as traitors to their country. Yet, even as they blast their erstwhile leader, declaring that the emperor wore no clothes, history does not record a fate befalling them as elsewhere in our mad, bad and terrible world. Democracy lives here. None other than Barbadians lose the power of dissent by agreeing en masse to stifle disagreement among themselves.
We submit that on two occasions in our recent history, the people have engaged in popular contests rather than the solemn exercise of the cherished vote. They have dabbled more times than we care to count with hero worship, personality cults and tribalism. We get what we vote for.
Now we find ourselves so desperate for a voice – any voice – other than the elaborate echo chamber that we created ballot by ballot that each act of defiance is lionised as a latter-day David against a Goliath, both entirely of our own making. For the same citizens who disdain every utterance of disagreement, respectful or otherwise, in their own midst, who colour every statement in one of only two tribal flavours, will cheer on members of a political class to speak while they hush others into silence.
Ironically, one of Thorne’s assignments by the government he formerly embraced was an appraisal of our local governance structure. What now will happen to all that work paid for by the taxpayer? What did his review yield of the inordinate influence of political parties in our governance structure?
It would be even more ironic if the government, whose super-majority remains untouched by the latest episode of musical chairs, includes in its legislative and constitutional changes measures to prevent crossing the floor.
The very same Westminster system that is the favourite whipping boy for our politicians is used to spectacular effect at each available moment. What is often left out of the anti-Westminster diatribe is the fact that by convention – in our case legislated by a constitution – political parties have no place in our Parliament. Thorne was elected by the majority of the people of Christ Church South to represent all of them, not a private member’s club, secret society or tribe.
If Thorne means to be a force for political good – and again, we do not for a moment doubt his sincerity or question his motive – then he must use his position to take his one-man commission on local governance to the people in another form. That his former political master sought to introduce other figures in his constituency triggering his self-imposed exile from the people of Christ Church South is not an act that imperils democracy. From what we can observe, only his ego was bashed. The system that brought him to face the electorate twice for one political party, allowed his sudden and unexplained switch to another and his final entry into the House 15 years later on the long coattails of a party leader, is the same system that anointed and now disappointed him.
We expect, then, as he attempts to take the high road and the long view for the benefit of the people, that the Opposition Leader will begin to garner support for a change of political culture in which a leader determines who is a candidate for elections where there is no established primary process, determines who will join him or her in the executive and the upper chamber, has sole discretion over when the voters exercise the franchise except on a date known only to them and the absence of oversight and accountability in more beyond public accounts – all these and frightfully more are subjects for Thorne’s expected thoughtful, serious-minded examination.
He – and the 29 he leaves to one side – should not, however, be under any illusion as to who wields true power in this country – if only they who wield it seem occasionally to forget.
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