Introduction:
There is an SOS flag flying over Barbados, people are struggling to survive in rough seas and the rescue boat, in the form of the government, has lost its direction and cannot locate the helpless victims. We have witnessed a fog of macro-economic lying and deceit by technocrats and politicians using the national loyalty of Barbadians to deceptively feed them bogus economic policies as palliatives for curing the nation’s economic ills.

Despite this, there has not been as much as a whisper from our leading public intellectuals, academics or opposition politicians. The better informed know that what passes as official policy will never rescue the economy in a month of Sundays; they know that minister Sinckler is out of his depth as a manager of the national economy; they know that either the governor of the central bank is being ignored, or that he is putting politics before sound financial economics, yet they remain silent. The crisis has also exposed the lack of ideological and philosophical differences between the two main parties, thus their emphasis on personalities. Not only is this sameness reinforced by the almost total silence of the official Opposition – over and above the occasional call for government action, while at the same time remaining silent about its own alternative policies – it now runs deeper in society. The lack of ideological differences is also demonstrated by the ease with which individuals can cross the floor of parliament from party to party and, sometimes, back again.

Many people are hypnotised by the bogus claim to undying party loyalty, ignoring the wider principles that bring (or should have brought) people in to politics. A good example of this is the total silence from individual members of parliament over the need to protect those left behind as the dark economic clouds blanket the country. Who is going to speak up for the elderly living in abject poverty, the army of jobless young men and women, the ill who cannot get proper medical attention at our only hospital? Who is going to speak out against a bandit government that is willing to sell citizenship to the highest bidder, lease our hospital buildings to wealthy private medical firms, allow Barbados to be used as a flag of convenience for unseaworthy ships? Public sector redundancies are but a single symptom of the failure of government and the institutionalisation of lies by politicians and policymakers. When a simple-minded party loyalist could put party before country then we know that the rot has gone right through the society.

What kind of society will allow a 16 year old girl and her 18 yr old brother to care for their six, eight and 11 yr old siblings, without any aid from social services, the church, or well-intentioned people for well near four years, after their father, the only breadwinner, was shot dead? This level of barbarism in a society that claims for itself to be ‘developed’, ‘civilised’ and ‘educated’, beggars belief.

A society that is willing to sell its birthright for thirty pieces of silver to gangsters, money launderers, spiv Irish property developers, former owners of gypsy encampment sites, and other dubious characters in search of Barbadian citizenship and most probably on the run from the tax authorities or the police in their native countries. This suffering by these young people can be multiplied by tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands fold. It is the manifestation of a society that has lost its soul, of a people living in a fairyland, a people who have decided that reality is too tough to face so they live a pretend life.

Recently I offered a plane ticket to a cousin of mine, a fourth generation American of Barbadian descent, to visit the island and she refused. “Food is too expensive,” she said. Asking 20 members of parliament, no matter which party they belong to, to vote on their conscience for a ten per cent reduction in their salaries – especially given that most of them have alternative sources of income – is not a threat to our democracy. Rather, it is a testament of our civilisation, of the nature of our public ethics. But then again some people think ‘ethics’ is the name of a new soft drink. The only way out for us as a nation is to put country before party.

Policies:
In the absence of any serious national debate, either on platforms, debating chambers, in parliament or in the media, Barbadians have very few sources of objective economic policy analysis. In light of this information vacuum, like a flowing tide of water, they opt for the source of least resistance, supporting the ideas of people they know and are comfortable with rather than those they do not. The trouble with this show of local loyalty, is that the talent pool is small, the circulation of ideas is narrow and the origins of those ideas have a similarity – from primary school, to secondary school, to university, to professional practice. These narrow intellectual horizon eventually feeds through in to the way we are governed and, subsequently, in policymaking and collective social values.

So, in policymaking terms, we get a government under pressure deciding to introduce an element of quantitative easing (good), but spending over Bds$200m on road repairs and building (bad), not only is this is a waste of taxpayers’ money, but it now seems preordained as if the same contractors are engaged for all big public sector projects. Then there is the further waste of taxpayers’ money on Four Seasons, to be repeated on Almond Resorts, to be repeated by setting up a special fund to finance badly managed privately owned small hotels – underwritten by national insurance.

All these obvious public policy failures are based on a culture of inward-looking policymaking, a desire to grab the headlights rather than to do what is needed in the long-term interest of the nation. It is also a failure of the few public intellectuals, in particular the press, to raise and debate pressing public policy issues, either for fear of personal abuse or being made to look ill-informed. But the policy-making deficit is huge, even though for obvious reasons we tend to concentrate at present on the economy.

As has been pointed out on a number of occasions, from the criminal justice system (the logjam of cases going back decades, the civil war within the police, the territorial battle between police and customs, etc), education (the annual failure of our the vast majority of school leavers to get good results, the battle for control between the teachers’ unions and heads, a weak minister, etc), the civil service (poor drafting of legislation, poor cost/benefit analyses, top-heavy management, too many on the public payroll, etc).

Then there is the rhetoric about restructuring, but the failure to act: privatising the Transport Board, the Water Authority, the government printery, the portfolio of hotels, the equity share in LIAT, etc) in a climate that suggests that to return ownership of public assets to the people is a form of robbery. It is as if other forms of ownership are not part of the wider discussion or maybe a deep desire by politicians to interfere with functioning and management of statutory bodies, such as CBC.

What are the other domestic, regional and international issues? What about the moribund Caricom? How much does it cost taxpayers to keep this corpse on a lifesaving machine? Then again, this raises the issue of a social dimension to our post-independence democracy, another colossal failure. In a winner/loser  unforgiving culture, those who succeed move from their traditional communities to the Heights and Terraces, leaving those who are left trapped in these towns and communities to suffer the humiliation of their so-called failure. This is reinforced by the bogus arguments around the elevated importance of monetary and fiscal policy, while leaving the wider social dimension out of the question. Sometimes our politicians do not raise these issues, not even the ones who claim to be radicals, because they do not fully understand the central importance of the social policy issues. Just look at the lack of any discussion, by the DLP government, BLP Opposition, or the other groupings that pretend to the political throne, about youth unemployment; not a single one wants to discuss the training, education and job opportunities for young people, the future of our nation, unless, of course, we are talking crime. This is a silent savagery, a Holocaust perpetuated on poor young men and women (these are who they are) by the so-called middle class professionals.

It is social cleansing of the most evil kind: build more prisons to warehouse these social vagrants and wasters, this ruling elite most probably say when drinking their expensive whisky and Champagne. Is this not a good time to raise the question of income inequality? What about a national land use policy? How about writing the issue of public access in to clearly understood law? We are now in such a state that what passes for a national debate quickly moves from substance to motives: which party do you support? What qualifies you to have these views? In fact, who are you?

Intellectual Failure:
By far the elephant in the room of the basic and diversionary debate about university tuition fees and the notion of ‘free’ education, is that those generations that have benefited from ‘free’ education have not come to the plate and paid back any of their dues by participating in the national discussion. It is this intellectual failure, along with allowing political gimmickry about free education to become serious policy, and in particular from full-time professional academics, that exposes the weakness in our national conversation. Instead they have left a small minority of semi-educated political proselytisers to shout in the dark, including those advocates of the destruction of corporate capitalism, like a drunken man urinating up against a wall. Typically, they have not suggested any alternative business models to hedge the nation against any future financial collapse, or withdrawal of funding to small businesses and households by foreign-owned banks, or any new models of business organisation. Nothing about the expansion of mutuality, cooperatives, of common ownership structures, of reforms of company legislation, of worker representatives on firm boards – nothing, zilch.

Analysis and Conclusion:
Despite patting themselves on the back about the quality of our public education, when the chips are down we have been found wanting. We are being eclipsed by St Lucia, in terms of the creation of human capital and of policymaking; we have been outshone by Trinidad in terms of financial engineering and corporate expansion (a Trinidad-domiciled firm now operates in Scotland in whisky-making) and, most of all, in the quality of our public sector bureaucracy. We have a political and business elite that is happy looking for solutions from the top down in the vain belief that ideas can only flow downwards.

No publicly known individual, no organisation, no trade union, has been out in the streets putting the case for bottom up reforms; after all, ideas coming from ordinary people can not be any more useless than those coming out of parliament, the senior ranks of the civil service, and from our insular, closeted business class. But there is a fear of contagion. What is wrong with common ownership? Why should the commercial prospects of a mutual, or a cooperative or a collective ownership of some kind be any worse than a private equity one? Maybe one reason is that the understated message from the ruling elite is that ordinary people cannot be business successes, that they lack the acumen, they do not have MBAs from the top business schools. Or it is just that Barbadians have lost confidence in themselves, are happy taking a public sector monthly salary, arrive at work when they like, do as much or as little as they like, and leave early to collect the kids from school. May be that lack of self-discipline is contagious, passing from generation to generation until it has become part of our occupational DNA.

For nearly six years we have sat back and watched as our leaders sadly failed to even understand what is going on in the global world. Just listen to the outright mis-information given by minister Sinckler in his Budget Speech and, occasionally by prime minister Stuart about the state of the global economy. Either they are victims of their researchers bad work or are deliberately economical with the truth or, as I see it, they just ignore corrections coming from responsible public servants and academics, including the central bank. The implication of this for government is that if you cannot get the basic ingredients right then the final pudding will be inedible. Part of the restructuring of our society is to confront the inflexibility of our labour market and the cartel operated by some trade union Godfathers. This is one reason why young people cannot get jobs and sets them against their parents’ and grand parents’ generations in the battle for jobs. At least we should talk about these creeping social problems, rather than allow the nonsense of aw Social Partnership to cloud our thinking. Governments are elected to govern, not to share office to big business and a business elite. Where is our political and civic Moses, to lead us out of this economic wilderness? Who is going to step up to the plate and offer the nation guidance?