You can always tell from what is said to you how others privately rate your ability to discern wheat from chaff. Lately the honorable ladies and gentlemen we elected to speak for us in parliament—handicapped as are most of them in consequence of their shared distaste for reading other than Facebook jottings authored by their equally uninformed hacks—have been especially bold. At two recent House sittings, no less than three members sought to make nonsense of Thomas, Duke of Norfolk’s contention in a 1538 letter to Thomas Cromwell, that: “A man cannot have his cake and eat it too.” Cromwell was then advisor to King Henry V111—generally considered a loose cannon.
Consider the following from the appropriately masked representative for Castries South at the most recent sitting of parliament: “We on this side, we did not support the state of emergency. We said, and the leader of the opposition mentioned it again this morning, that we would give the government all the space to allow them to formulate the approach they think is most required at this time to fight COVID-19.” He echoed an earlier description by another MP of the situation at hand: “He said this is a war. But it is a medical war, not a military war. The state of emergency was conceived for purposes of insurrection affecting our security; an invasion of the country . . . those are the circumstances that warrant extraordinary power.”
“When you have a medical war as you have in Saint Lucia,” the MP observed, “there are provisions that allow us the powers we need. But if you decide you want to use the state of emergency, then go ahead and do it.” It seemed to me the MP spoke from both sides of his mouth. On the one hand, he agreed the nation was at war. A war with only medical personnel engaged, by his presumed definition, not a military war involving foreign invaders or local insurrectionists. But nevertheless a war. And what responsible government would not go out of its way to use every tool in its arsenal to avert a war—or to keep its people safe from the consequences of war.
The conventional wisdom would suggest that in any war it is better to be prepared for any eventuality than be caught flatfooted and ill-equipped for what confronts you. But the Castries South MP was in a mood only to oppose. He suggested, by all he repeated in parliament this week, he knew precisely the limits of a so-called medical war (which he did not define, doubtless with good reason).
Shooting simultaneously from both sides of his mouth, the MP recalled he and his opposition colleagues “did not support a state of emergency” because there were less stringent laws to keep under control the war as he saw it.
Nevertheless, he and his opposition brothers would leave the government the space it needed to do whatever it considered the best interests of the nation. Allen Chastanet and his Cabinet should never forget this is precisely why they were elected to office on 6 June 2016—and not the now opposition party!
