COP

They say a week is a long time in politics.  A week ago, I thought the main news item that would've occupied the front-burner would've been the Guardian's reporting of a top government official being fingered in an alleged conspiracy to wilfully pervert the course of public justice in relation to charges against two former People’s National Movement ministers.  Or the criticisms of Hon.

1. Latoya Woods
2. The Prime Minister’s Top Ten ranking.
3. The CoP’s salary.

When Jedi Master Yoda sensed a shift in the force, he attributed it to the snuffing out of millions of lives in that instant. When Mr. Shan Ali  (father of murder victim Neeshad Ali) declared "I am convinced there is a change in the force right now.

The local government manifestos released by the various parties for the elections on 26 Jul 2010 may be found below:

Just a quick pointer - while the Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has put out the specifications for laptops that 'public' tender has started on (see the specs here), there were remarks made about a laptop in the local media (Newsday, perhaps? ) that did not do much to answer questions regarding a cheap laptop that India was making.

It has been unveiled, complete with video:

I've just witnessed T&T's first national political debate prior to an election, televised live on CNMG's C TV (find the recorded video here).  Here are my initial views.

From a distance, some emails came across that defined the specifications for the laptops that the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago will be paying for so that children can have them. No, the People's Partnership isn't giving them to the children - you are, out of your treasury. Being able to identify that means you are intelligent. Not being able to identify that means you are...

I first asked this question in the run-up to the recent General Elections and got a few responses.  The general conclusion then was that voters only have the power to hold their representatives truly accountable when they stain their fingers in a polling station (or to a lesser extent in internal party elections, e.g. UNC, or leaving to form your own party, like COP).  This power becomes diminished when we revert to traditional voting patterns of supporting the status quo despite their poor performance.

NOTE: The T&T Elections & Boundaries Commission (EBC) did not publish detailed results by party by constituency via its website at the time I wrote this.  As a result, I had to rely on unverified figures from third-party websites that claimed to have obtained them from the EBC.  The 2007 results were preliminary figures released on 05 Nov 2007 and the 2010 results were preliminary figure