After careful consideration I have decided that I will not be voting in the sham “Consultative Poll” on 17th March.
This is a subject on which everyone must follow their own judgement, but my reasons are:
1) obody’s vote will make any difference to the
outcome. The Civil Service has already
reorganised itself around the “Ministerial Form of Government”. If people don’t vote for that, do they expect
us to believe they are going to un-reorganise?
However people vote, we are clearly going to get the Ministerial Form of
Government. If the conclusion has
already been decided why should I bother turning out to vote?
2.
The Ministerial Form of Government is what the
FCDO wants. They have wanted it since
2004 (it was rejected in 2005 by a completely valid poll). The FCDO funds St Helena and expects to get
what it wants, so has charged the Governor with the task to “make it happen”,
whatever Saints want. This is why the
whole process to date has been undemocratic and maybe even unconstitutional: selecting
Professor Sarkin, a friend of the Governor, to “study Governance” and recommend
the required solution; ignoring the inconvenient recommendations of the Sarkin
Report; the governor’s personally selected “Governance Commission”; failure to
answer any questions about costs during the “consultations”; and now a “poll”
with no stated process for deciding if the verdict is meaningful. The whole process has been fixed from start
to finish to deliver the desired result.
3.
SHG only accepts public opinion when it suits
it. As quoted in yesterday’s Sentinel
(p8), SHG accepted fewer than 100 positive views expressed in the Governance
Consultations as “public opinion”, but ignored the fishing petition (1,191
signatures). They clearly don’t actually
care what the public thinks.
4.
When they declare that the Ministerial Form of
Government is the “will of the people” (which they will, whatever the results
of the poll), a few Saints will get richer and the ordinary Saints will either
see no change, or will lose their jobs to pay for the new system, the costs of
which have not been disclosed (it has been asked many times; it hasn’t
answered). I will not be party to this
travesty of democracy.
If you do intend to vote I’d be interested to read your reasoning below.
No comments:
Post a Comment