The British go to a general election four days before Guyanese do, and are engaged in as intense a campaign as any that has taken place here. There are, of course, real issues which divide the parties in the UK, but nevertheless, the various psephologists who routinely turn out predictions about the outcome of the ballot seem agreed that no party will win an overall majority. In this country in contrast, there can be no minority government this time around; it is an overall majority or nothing situation.
As far as campaigning is concerned, the main difference between what has been taking place here and what is happening there, relates to the level of the debate. At least the leaders and the candidates in Britain are discussing substantive issues, however superficially ‒ or misleadingly, in some cases ‒ and scurrilous tactics such as Mr Bharrat Jagdeo’s indirect appeal to racist sentiment, would not be tolerated even by a perpetrator’s own party. Neither, it must be said, will the parties retain any candidate around whom the whiff of corruption hovers.
The UK Independence Party, or UKIP, as it is better known, only recently suspended one of their candidates who is also a European MP, after it was alleged that a member of her staff arranged with a restaurant to be given an invoice three times the actual cost of the meal which was provided. The intention was to charge it to Brussels, and it seems now that the police are to be called in. It might be added that within the space of twenty-four hours another of the party’s candidates was suspended over an alleged incident of harassment in the workplace.
In a case which might have some resonance here, in 2013 it suspended one of its European MPs for calling a room full of women “sluts”, as well as for hitting someone over the head.
UKIP has also felt constrained to suspend a candidate in the current election for an anti-Semitic tweet sent to his Labour Party rival, while in February this year they immediately expelled one of their councillors without a hearing, in this instance, for making “deeply racist comments” on a BBC documentary.
The point is that many people in politics regard UKIP, with its controversial stances on immigration, in particular, as providing a natural haven for those with racist views of one kind or another, although inevitably this has been vigorously denied by its leader Nigel Farage. But whatever private views its elected representatives and its office-seekers may harbour privately on race, women and “gays” (there have been a couple of suspensions for derogatory statements in relation to the latter), the party recognises that there are defined limits to what can be said publicly, especially during the course of a campaign.
The problem with Guyana is that there are simply no defined limits on public expression by politicians, and so Mr Jagdeo has not experienced any adverse consequences from his outrageous statements. Taken in conjunction with the virulence of the scaremongering, what he and major elements of the PPP are conducting is not a political campaign at all, but a smear offensive. This is not to say that some in the coalition are not guilty of unacceptable utterances as well; they are. It is just that the tone of the campaign is being set by the ruling party, which has brought our political exchanges to the lowest point this country has ever seen, and in the process has been treating the electorate with nothing but scorn.
It is not even as if the voters have been able to see the leading candidates debate publicly with each other. This is because the coalition wants a prime ministerial debate as well as a presidential one, and the PPP is only willing to agree to the two presidential candidates confronting each other. Of course, given the degraded level of the campaign it might be a moot point as to how useful this might be, but as it is, the PPP does not want a prime ministerial candidates’ encounter because they are afraid that the political neophyte, Ms Elisabeth Harper, would not be able to cope with Mr Moses Nagamootoo, who after all, learnt his skills in the PPP itself.
In the case of the presidential candidates, while Mr Ramotar is no electrifying speaker, he does have great experience in the political arena and on the hustings, while Mr David Granger, who is very inexperienced, has shown himself to be lacking in political deftness and presentation, particularly in the earlier stages of the campaign. Perhaps, therefore, the coalition feels more confident about Mr Nagamootoo, who might redeem any possible shortcomings on the part of Mr Granger who has never shown himself to be strong in the area of the economy in particular, a subject on which Mr Ramotar, in contrast, is likely to appear more confident.
The one public debate involving David Cameron in the UK, as well as the leaders of five other parties, produced an entirely unanticipated outcome, since Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party stole the show, so to speak. Overnight, a leader who is hardly known south of the border became a national figure. Since so many leaders were involved, however, the discussion hardly gave much of an insight into party policies should any of them be elected. (Sturgeon was the exception, and, it might be added, she made a point of addressing herself specifically to English voters.)
A more interesting and fruitful arrangement was that organised by a regular BBC programme known as ‘Question Time’, in which the leaders from the three major parliamentary parties – Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democratic – stood in front of an audience in sequence. Each leader appeared alone, and there was no debate with his two colleagues; rather the audience asked the questions, and were able to ask follow-up questions if they were not satisfied with the answers they heard. The audience comprised 25 per cent each of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat voters, 15 per cent from the smaller parties and 10 per cent undecided.
The programme, it was reported, attracted 4.3 million viewers, and had been arranged because of accusations that the parties were unwilling to engage with ordinary voters. As it was, Leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, was cornered by a questioner into saying that Labour would not go into a coalition with the SNP if neither of the main parties won an overall majority. Considering that the latest polls suggest the SNP might sweep Scotland, Labour would need its 59 seats in order to be able to even consider forming a government. Miliband’s critics inevitably hammered him the following morning for being prepared to allow the Tories to go into government rather than do a deal with the SNP.
Where Guyana is concerned, such an encounter would be problematic, because of the divisive and vituperative nature of local politics. As far as even organising it is concerned, it would be difficult to find anyone who all the parties involved agreed was objective or at least independent at some level. (Even in Britain UKIP accused the BBC of a left-wing bias.) Then there would be problems identifying a moderator whom everyone could accept. Even selecting the audience would be a challenge, while the hardest part would come over the initial questions to be asked, which would presumably have to be screened since one would not want a brawling-style exchange; that would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise.
In other words, the appallingly low level of Guyana’s political campaign is selling the electorate short. Despite the manifestos, despite the political meetings, voters are still not getting the kind of debate, the responses to any queries they may have in their minds and the information they require to come to a rational decision. What they are getting is half-truths at best, along with heavy doses of vilification and contempt. It is not the way to run a campaign in a democracy.
