Peoples Partnership

A friend asked on facebook for our thoughts on whether the Opposition has the welfare of the country at heart by defeating the "hanging bill" in Parliament this week.  It triggered the usual discussion about hanging.  Along the way, he said that based on the murder stats from the years around the last set of hangings in T&T, hanging definitely is a deterrent.

Hon. Minister of Finance, Winston Dookeran, delivered the 2010-11 Budget Statement in Parliament today.  The Statement and related documents have been published on the Finance Ministry's website (kudos to the Ministry's staff for posting these online so quickly), and you may get them in PDF from the website's Publications section.

The Hon. Minister of Education and the Hon.

At the risk of it falling on ears that have become spectacularly deaf since 25 May 2010, somebody needs to go to the Ministry of Education (MoE) at 18 Alexandra Street, St Clair, and screech loudly to the folks in there: 'MoE, we have a problem!'

As reported in today's Trinidad Guardian, the Hon. Minister of Labour, Small and Micro Enterprises Errol Mc Leod says the minimum wage will not be increased to $20 an hour. He was made to respond to widespread claims that this was a People's Partnership campaign promise.

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

An interesting, but incomplete, conversation on facebook made me wonder: what methods do we have in T&T to hold the winning politicians to their campaign promises after 24 May 2010?

UNC candidate, Mr Jack Warner, has questioned the late withdrawal by the management of the National Library and Information System Authority (NALIS) of its permission to use NALIS’s Port-of-Spain branch for the People's Partnership manifesto launch today at 10:30 a.m.  He claimed that the permission was withdrawn after NALIS accepted the UNC's formal application for the use of its faciliti

People's Partnership Leader, Mrs Kamla Persad-Bissessar was quoted, in reference to the UK's newly-formed coalition government: '... no-one is saying that the [Lib-Con] coalition is a threat to Britain. In fact what they are saying is that it is a tribute to the strength of the system of parliamentary democracy.'