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One-and-done proposals
December 16, 2001
By Denis Solomon
PROFESSOR John Spence, former Senator, has made some interesting proposals to deal with the Parliamentary deadlock. They were published in Friday’s Express.
In view of the statements of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition that we might have a government by the end of the week, Professor Spence’s proposals may have been superseded by the time this column appears. Nevertheless, some of them address the major issues. So it may still be useful to compare them, and my comments on them, with whatever arrangement emerges from the Panday-Manning discussions.
Mainly for reasons of space, I am omitting one or two of Professor Spence’s proposals that refer to election funding, party broadcast time and media coverage of Parliamentary debates. The ones that in my opinion address the central issues are the following:
•Elections to be held in November 2002.
This may well happen, but I think Professor Spence is putting the cart before the horse in fixing a date for elections at this point, and as the basic requirement. It implies that all the other proposals are sufficient to resolve the crisis by November. In fact, any solution that can be proposed now, however sensible, can only be partial and temporary. If the deadlock, the proposals that have been made for its resolution, and the unforeseeable events that will inevitably follow produce a significant upsurge in popular political consciousness, the next election will certainly be held within a very different constitutional framework from any that we have had in the past. So a time frame is counter-productive.
If the November elections proposed by Professor Spence are meant to reassure the politicians and the parties, too bad – any serious progress will certainly usher in a dispensation to which existing leaders and parties will have to adapt very quickly, or be swept away.
Professor Spence says that if either of the political parties breaks its promise to abide by his conditions, the voters will deal with it by not voting for it in the next election.
This begs the entire question. The very root of the problem is that voters continue to support their party regardless of what promises it breaks. If by next November that attitude has changed, voters will be using more rational criteria anyway; and, as I said above, they may well be voting for a very different set of people. If that doesn’t happen, then Professor Spence’s November election will simply produce another tie.
•Post of Prime Minister to alternate between UNC and PNM.
•Ministers of Finance, Information, National Security and Attorney General to be non-party individuals brought in through the Senate.
•Parties to jointly nominate 22 persons to the Senate from nominations made by civil society groups.
The latter two suggestions seem to conflict. The phrase “non-party” suggests that there will also be “party” Senators; but 22 is obviously meant to represent the present total of party nominations (16+6). Does Professor Spence mean that the four Ministers must come from the nine independents appointed by the President, or does he consider that nomination by civil society would make all the Senators “non-party” (in which case the phrase is redundant)?
Professor Spence does not say whether each Prime Minister, when his turn comes, should appoint his own four ministers “through” the Senate, firing the previous four, or whether the two leaders should agree on the four at the beginning of the arrangement and keep them right through. In the latter case, getting agreement on the individuals will be even harder than getting agreement on the principle. Not to mention the difficulty of having a minister of, say, finance for only five or six months.
•Separate Commissions of Inquiry into each of the recent accusations of corruption, to report in nine months.
Why not nine weeks? Or even, in the more blatant cases, nine days? We have to jettison the belief that inquiries take forever. On the other hand, Lloyd Best said on TV6 on Thursday that the question of corruption should be put on the back burner. The main thing was to get ourselves on the road to a system where corruption would be less. Against this is the fact that Mr. Manning, for all his political obtuseness, has realised that the greatest objection of the PNM rank and file to power-sharing is the fear that it may let corrupt UNC politicians off the hook. Perhaps Professor Spence included this condition in his plan to make it possible for Manning to sign up to it.
•Parliamentary Committees to be set up with an Independent Senator to chair each, and all proceedings to be broadcast in full.
•Parliamentary Committees on what?
This is a very final-sounding suggestion. It implies a whole set of rules for referral, scheduling, amendment and return of Bills that can only be part of a well-tried system. To chair such committees requires considerable legislative experience, which the independent Senators are least likely to have. A proper committee system will have to be part of any legislature we end up with; to try to introduce it into what will certainly be a lame-duck legislature is a risky proposition.
•EBC voter’s lists to be regularised.
Yes, and the present EBC to resign! It may not be too early to implement proposals that have been floating around for a long time for making the EBC more visibly impartial. Chief among these is to have representatives of political parties on it.
•Both political parties should allow free votes on all measures in both Houses of Parliament.
This is the key to the whole thing, for without it each Prime Minister would find 50 per cent of the House of Representatives against him.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon
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