While, on the basis of the stay of execution, Prime Minister Spencer has declared his government firmly in control, few will believe that the government can now give its undivided attention to the business of the country. The UPP will be contemplating the odds if the appeal should go against it in respect of all the constituencies. For the ALP is already suggesting that if this should be so, then Lester Bird, the party’s leader should be called to form a government and allowed to put its claim before the Parliament, given that the party would then have seven seats to the UPP’s 6. On the other hand, however, the Barbuda representative, who is Minister of Public Works in the government would seem more likely to choose to indicate support for the present incumbents, this resulting in a tie in the House, which the ALP would have to decide to challenge.
Present speculation suggests two other alternatives open to the government in the event that it loses the appeal. The first would be to call elections in the three constituencies and take its chances. In the last general election of March 2009, its numbers in the House declined from 12 to the present nine, a trend suggesting that the opposition was able to turn some circumstances, including difficult economic times resulting from the global recession and measures taken by the government to combat them, against it. The government would therefore have to concern itself with whether the electorate has taken a more positive view of its performance during the last year. The same considerations would presumably apply to a second option, which would be to ask the Governor-General to call new elections.
The current responses of the Antigua Labour Party’s leader, Lester Bird, suggest a certain anxiety to hold the reins of office again. Opposition has not been a normal home for the ALP, which held office from the first elections after the grant of universal suffrage in 1951, with only an interregnum of opposition in 1971-1976, up to 1999 when they were defeated by the UPP. Difficult economic times in the 1990s resulted in the rejection of the ALP, particularly when these were coupled with allegations of government tolerance of corruption. In 1990 the results of a report of the Blom Cooper Commission of Inquiry into Antigua’s use as a transit point for weapons on the way from Israel to Colombia was published. And this was followed in subsequent years by the continuing doubts about the propriety of the ALP’s resort to what some deemed to be questionable sources of investment finance, including the financial operations of the Swiss financier Rapporport, and then those of Allen Stanford.
The fact of the matter was, however, that the Bird government, initially at the instance of Vere Bird Sr, was one of the first in the region to take the view that there would have to be a transition from the old plantation system, represented in Antigua by the sugar industry, to new sources for generating finance for growth. Vere Bird’s decisive liquidation of the industry and his government’s shift to a focus on services, in particular tourism and then banking, gave the country’s economy a decisive spurt, leading to a per capita income of just over US$10,000 by the end of the decade of the 2000s (Antigua’s population is about 85,000 and about 39,000 voted in the last election). Included in these policies was the abolition of personal income tax, an initiative which proved electorally popular. But accompanying this too, over the years, has been a relative slackness in fiscal management, weak regulation of investors in financial services, and inattention to public services controls.
The Spencer government has had to come to terms with many of these deficiencies, in the face of further difficulties brought on by the global economic recession. Up to March 2009, the IMF was finding it necessary, in the face of much speculation, to say that it had “neither sought nor received a request for an IMF programme for the Government of Antigua and Barbuda.” But one year later, that is last month, the Fund announced a three-year standby arrangement (loan) for US$241M for the country, reporting that it was needed to address “the most severe economic crisis” in its history, since “the global economic crisis has compounded long-standing fiscal imbalances and drastically reduced tourism, foreign direct investment and remittances,” in exchange, as it were, for “a range of policy measures including more efficient tax collection.”
In turn, the Spencer government has immediately found itself faced with strenuous public and parliamentary opposition from the ALP to its acceptance of an IMF programme. So the electorate, if faced with either by-elections or general elections, will certainly have to face the issue of what attitude the ALP, once again under Lester Bird, would want to take if it were to assume the reins of government. In that regard, Mr Bird’s enthusiasm for what would appear to be a transfer of government almost immediately, if the Court of Appeal should rule against the UPP, would seem to indicate a desire to obviate the necessity to answer that question in an election campaign.
This issue in Antigua brings to light concerns about the conduct of elections in the Eastern Caribbean islands. The recent general elections in both Dominica and St Kitts have raised the issue of political parties financing the transport of voters who, though registered in these islands, are for all practical purposes domiciled in other places, particularly in the United States and neighbouring territories like the Virgin Islands and the Netherlands West Indies. This has been something of a longstanding practice in Antigua and St Kitts, where the electorates are relatively small with, consequently, additional small numbers making a difference to the result. These issues have now also been taken to the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court, with some complaining that this is likely to draw the judicial system into the political arena.
A further issue relates to the sources of financing of elections with parties, both government and opposition complaining that a new level has now been reached. For the dependence is now seen not simply to be on local private sector financiers presumably eager to influence whoever wins, but from new sources like major overseas financiers, particularly in the tourism and financial services sectors, and stretching into the arena of the financiers of the movement of drugs through these territories. The same kinds of influences are being said to result from the apparent financing of elections by the Government of Taiwan, allegations most recently made by the opposition party in St Lucia.
The results from the courts in these countries will, perhaps, begin to define these practices more closely, at least from the point of view of the legal improprieties or defects involved. And any such precedents created in these coming cases should be of interest to the Caribbean Community as a whole.
