2:43BIt makes sense also for people who see themselves as the casualties of this arrangement to say, you know, we have to disturb that or dismantle that, or we have to find some ways of negotiating with that in which we arrive at some measure of equality and social justice and so on. So there’s a stage at which the party thing makes sense. Now, in the colonial context, and I think this has been encouraged, there’s a stage when it then does not make sense. It makes sense when, for example, and this you had in Barbados, you would have had the owners of property, and there was a time when there was a white elite who all of them called Broad Street and Bridgetown and so on.
3:35BWere owned by a handful of white people and all the land and so on. And then you have in the ’30s, there is this great explosion all over this region. People have really been taken to the brink, couldn’t take it anymore, and you had these riots all over the place. The political parties grew out of this in the 1940s. So something like the Barbados Labour Party, it was the earliest one, comes out of those riots and so on. Very interesting situation that people sometimes identify Adams as being the cause of riots and so on. That is not true. The riots made Adams. He didn’t make the riots.
4:17BBut the point is he was that educated voice and so on articulating. Now, where this begins to negate itself and to stop having meaning is when a division takes place between that exploited mass, then begins to fragment, and another party comes out of that, and another party comes out of that, so that the original conservative party in a way almost withers away deliberately because given the numerical superiority of the other people, they can’t win an election anymore. But what they can do is that they can, they can in fact manipulate that situation and it pleases them to see this fragmentation taking place among this mass of the population.
5:21BNow this is where it becomes a bane, that power is really the attraction. So you have these leaders of parties and what they’re really interested in is how do we occupy these seats of power, how do we get these instruments of power which we can employ. And this is what I mean by... The parties then enter into a kind of very turbulent sort of rivalry for office. But this becomes a sort of really suicidal family affair because you have one set of people, we may call it the Bs or whatever, and another set of Ds and so on. When you check the material circumstances of these people on either side, there’s fundamentally no difference.
6:22BThey’re not looking for different things. They’re both asking either to improve their wages, improve their housing conditions, and so on. They don’t have any particular philosophy of society that varies. It is not a question of -- where you would have in England a very distinct thing, of a Conservative Party wanting to conserve and extend private property. Conservative parties don’t want you to mess with private property, and then they’re challenged by a Labour Party who says, oh no, that’s out of the question. Private property is a kind of totalitarian control of the society, we can’t have that. And in order to deal with that, what we’re going to do is -- Nationalize.
7:06BWe must nationalize what they would regard as the major instruments of production. And so, so the Labour Party comes about, and what it does is that iron, steel, all the things that you make money out of privately, we are going to turn that over to the state. There is a very direct confrontation and conflict of policy and view And concept of society between these two. Should this thing be privately owned or should the major industries of the society come under public control? That makes sense. What I’m saying, it does not make sense when Party B and Party D are having a quarrel and the base that supports them and so on are talking about the same thing.
7:56AMm-hmm.
7:56BWhat are you really quarreling about? It’s like the party has now become a club, that you’re playing a game of who’s going to win this, who’s going to win this game, but it’s the same game that you’re playing. You have no problem with the rules, there’s no argument about the rules, there’s no argument about the umpire, it’s exactly the same game. You’re saying we want to win, we want to win, and to do what? When you check it out, there’s absolutely no difference either in the formation of their parties, in the people who constitute their parties, and you cannot detect any difference in the particular policies of the parties.
8:33BIf you take your local situation here in Barbados and so on, for a long time under both administrations, BLP or DLP and so on, on the 2 critical issues on which parties may divide in, say, conservative and labour and so on, on, there is no division. Both parties are agreed on one, that there should be free access to healthcare. That is a fundamental policy of both parties. Neither party ever comes and says, oh no, we’re not going in for that. People have to pay this or pay that. Oh no, no. Both parties, as far as policy goes, believe in that access. access, that not having money must not be an impediment to getting some kind of medical care.
9:24BNo party will argue with the other about whether we should have that.
9:27ARight.
9:28BBoth parties agree that there should be equal free access to education at all levels. No party would ever go into a campaign saying we have to stop this free education business and so on. So in other words, you cannot find any area of real distinction where policy and concept of society is concerned, that they differ. The only difference they have is you have the government, I don’t, and I want the government. This is what we have to battle about.
10:02AYeah.
10:02BWho should have the government? And then it gets very personal about who stole more and so on and so on. This is what I mean. In other words, then you start cultivating a support that is about winning, and all the support is concerned about what are we going to do to win the next election, what are we going to do to win the next election. There is not any emphasis placed on the function of the party --
10:31ARight.
10:31B-- in the political education of my supporters, so that we say, look, this is the sort of society I’m thinking that we should aim for, and so on. So the battle goes on. This is what I mean, that the rivalry between the parties actually put an end to any serious debate of political thought. That is not on the agenda. The agenda is who will win the next election.
10:57AOkay.
10:57BAnd there is no indication on either party that that they want to change that. But there’s an interesting -- in the book Sovereignty of Imagination, I have a passage in that about the parties, but then I quote -- there’s a very, very interesting speech by Arthur.
11:24AYes, I read that.
11:25BBy Owen Arthur. Very remarkable, in which he’s almost saying something like that. And he’s speaking about the Westminster system, which we’ve taken over, and how it’s not really adequate because in that system it’s what he says, that the -- we inherited a system in which it is encouraged to the victors the spoils. Which means whoever wins the election, you can do whatever you want. And he goes on to say, you know, and this has ensured -- this is the point -- this has ensured that at any time almost half the population of any given Caribbean society is marginalized, alienated from participation in the development of their society. There has been no Too destructive a competition for political office, too heavy a concentration of power in the hands of the ruling elite, and an unhealthy preservation of anti-development party and tribal division.
12:37BThis is the same. Who wins gets everything, which means if I win and I only get 50%, I only win with 50%, even the other 50%, you’re not getting nothing while we are here. You have to wait for the next 5 years. And keep your fingers crossed that that may happen. So actually you have someone as distinguished as a former Prime Minister drawing to your attention the very dysfunctional nature of the party system that you are using.
13:05AYes.
13:05BAnd I therefore say that if you could have at that level such a serious reservation about the function of the party system, party, and such absolute clarity about its dysfunctional nature, then you really ought to think seriously of how you get rid of it.
13:27ASo why do you think --
13:29BI mean, unless you want to keep people in that particular state of, you know, just fighting to see who will win the next election and so on.
