In Trinidad & Tobago there are 41 Parliamentary seats. The ruling People's National Movement (PNM) has 22 seats and the opposition UNC has 19 seats. An argument has erupted over whose fault it was that the Budget debate - arguably the most important debate in a Parliamentary year - was truncated and brought to a premature close. My answer is that it is the fault of both sides. We can argue over who might be more to blame than the other, but the truth is that both sides are to blame. And we (the people) are the losers.
Let's look at it as clearly as possible: a Budget debate is supposed to be about a government accounting to the people through the Parliament what it spent and took in over the last fiscal year and what it proposes to do/spend in the coming fiscal year. Therefore, it is a most serious debate and not one in which one should play games. If an opposition does not want to partake in the debate, for whatever reason, the Ministers should still account for their respective Ministries. Unfortunately, a lot of them didn't. One gets the most unfortunate impression that the Government was more interested in 'scoring points' than in accounting to the people. Either that or they were simply too incompetent to give an accounting.
As for the Opposition, while it is true that the Government has superior numbers and they were obviously trying to 'hold their fire power' for when the Ministers deigned to speak they could and should have put in a speaker with instructions to him/her to lambaste the Government for not putting in their Ministers to speak and risk being criticized. (Instead of Ministers, a lot of backbenchers spoke who seemed to delight more in politics than in getting a proper accounting for the people that they are supposed to represent.) It wouldn't have been difficult to do that and the Government's rather cowardly action could and should have been exposed. But the Opposition was also obviously more interested in 'scoring points' rather than looking out for Trinidad & Tobago. That they chose instead to 'play games' is deplorable. Two, or even three wrongs can never make a right. And the Opposition was wrong to allow the Government to get off the hook like that. And so I say that the time has really come to look at our whole Parliamentary system and fix the obvious problems before they get worse. And believe me, there is no 'bottom'. Things can get worse. (But that is a whole other discussion. I do have some ideas which I will put out later for discussion).
Right now we have a system that encourages division in the society rather than creating a country where everyone feels that he/she has a stake in it. But until that happens (or snow falls in Trinidad) we can at least be honest with ourselves and tell BOTH sides to stop playing the fool and get down to representing us. Because right now we are being very poorly represented by BOTH sides. I could write a book on everything that BOTH sides are doing wrong. Perhaps (despite the failures of the NAR and COP) the time really has come for a third political party?
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