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Coitus Interruptus
December 19, 2001
By Denis Solomon
I am glad that the recounts in Barataria and San Fernando West have delayed any action the President may take to appoint a government. The delay gives me the opportunity to make my comments on the so-called agreement between those two gentlemen before the matter goes any further.
I'll start with a paragraph that was cut, for reasons of space, from my column in last Sunday's Express. It is relevant to what I have to say today.
The Sunday column examined suggestions made by former Independent Senator Professor John Spence for the resolution of the crisis. One suggestion was for alternating Prime Ministerships, and another was for free voting in the House of Representatives. These ideas had also been put forward by Lloyd Best. My column as it appeared ended by saying that this was the key to the whole situation. In the part that was omitted, however, I went on to say that MPs even now are theoretically free to vote however they like. The party whip is internal to the party, not part of the law. So parties might readily agree to "allow" free voting, while privately discouraging it. Besides, the sanctions inflicted by maximum leaders on errant members do not occur in the life of a Parliament, but rather in the selection of the party's candidates for election to the next one. The mentality of doctor politics would not change overnight.
I concluded that it would be a little more realistic to agree that the defeat of a bill should not entail the removal of the administration. In other words, each Prime Minister and Cabinet would finish their half-term whatever happened to their legislative proposals.
At the Constitution Reform Committee forum on Saturday Lloyd Best disagreed with me. He maintained that free voting might well induce the more courageous members of one party or the other to voice what they had known all along: that Panday and Manning are dictators. After all, said Best, three members of the UNC government have already done so, among them the one we would least have expected.
As it happens, the heads of agreement that have emerged from the meetings between Panday and Manning not only do not include alternating Prime Ministerships or a promise of free voting, but in fact contain nothing of value whatsoever.
Both Panday and Manning have shown themselves to be as unyielding, unimaginative, opportunistic and power-hungry as they have ever been, while putting on, for public consumption, a nauseating pretence of good fellowship; a fellowship that did not even go so far as to allow for a joint press conference at the end of the meeting, instead of separate statements.
The two so-called leaders have simply collaborated in doing what they have hitherto done separately: bamboozling the public. The most appalling part of the whole business is the way the media have collaborated in this bamboozlement. They have given the public false reassurance by praising the supposed spirit of compromise that produced this piddling set of non-decisions, and implying that it gives the President an opportunity to resolve the situation. The Sunday Express, in particular, editorialised that "both leaders are to be commended for the statesmanship (!) they displayed in approaching a difficult task and for the goodwill advanced in the bipartisan agreement". If this is statesmanship, spare us from anything less.
Panday and Manning have agreed only on what had to happen anyway: inquiries into corruption; electoral reform; constitution reform; fresh elections (the latter two without even a deadline).
Everything else in the agreement is meaningless. The public is being conned by politicians and press into thinking that the President can somehow break the deadlock by appointing a Prime Minister without any assurance that he or she will command a majority. The very fact that they have put the burden on him is a guarantee that there will be no such person.
The phrase being used to accomplish this bamboozlement is "in his absolute discretion". Discretion doesn't confer practical validity on a decision. The President failed to apply Section 76 of the Constitution when he had some justification for it (i.e. when Panday lost his majority and three defectors formed an alliance with the PNM, and even voted with it to defeat the UNC on a Bill). We are now being asked to believe that he can validly apply it when there is no justification whatsoever, and when his petitioners are declining to supply him with such justification. Clause 6 of the agreement, which calls for "consensus building at the parliamentary level" is not an undertaking to allow free voting, however false such an undertaking might have been.
Two of the remaining clauses, indeed, show the determination of Panday and Manning to remain firmly within a framework of doctor politics–in fact, their utter incapacity to conceive of anything else.
The most disgusting of these clauses is the proposal to "give effect to the Crossing the Floor Act and associated regulations". The Crossing the Floor Act is a denial of the basic principle of parliamentary democracy, which is that Parliament represents people, not parties. The purpose of that Act is to use the supreme law of the land to guarantee parties against defection, and thereby throttle debate in both parties and Parliament. It is typical of both men that they should seize the present opportunity to reinforce this prohibition. It is a sure sign that no real concession on either side is possible. It tells us the kind of Constitutional reform these two dinosaurs would favour. It is also both redundant and unnecessary: redundant because it is theoretically possible for someone to vote against his party without crossing the floor; unnecessary because in the present circumstances any MP who crossed the floor would be inviting instant assassination, especially a UNC MP, given the gangsterism that characterises that party's behaviour. Even Ramesh Maharaj has to go around with a bodyguard, and he stayed in the party.
The final irony is that, numerically speaking, crossing the floor is the one thing that would definitely resolve the crisis.
The other clause that betrays the insincerity of the parties to the so-called agreement is the requirement that a Speaker be chosen before the appointment of a Prime Minister. Manning "explained" this by saying that the Speaker must be relied on to cast his or her vote in favour of the status quo, and both parties want to be sure of appointing such a person. The truth is the exact opposite. If they wanted an impartial speaker, any crapaud would do. They would have chosen one already. Each leader really wants a Speaker partial to his party. Every Speaker in our history has been appointed because of his or her perceived partiality to the government. The fact that all previous Speakers have been ruled out of contention in the present case is proof of this.
Manning's "explanation" is particularly boldfaced, since it was he who declared a state of emergency in order to lock up Occah Seapaul for having allowed a vote of no confidence against him.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon
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