Twelve becomes six, becomes one?

There should be a General Election here next year. I'm wondering - how many seats will we be voting for? Now that ExCo has granted itself power to ignore what the other seven councillors think (yesterday's Sentinel, p9 and also see Cyril Leo's letter p2) maybe we will be voting for ExCo members only with LegCo being disbanded? What now is the point of LegCo? The committee system that has been bypassed was slow and tedious, and certainly doing away with LegCo would speed up the process of getting decisions made and Ordinances passed, if speed and efficiency is the primary objective. But if so, why stop there? To further increase speed and efficiency why have elected representatives at all? The fastest and most efficient way to take decisions is to vest all power in a single individual – the Governor – and stop all this slow and tedious Democracy all together. Think of the money we would save! Imagine how speedy and efficient decision making would be! And the $64bn question is: how much difference would that actually make? Frighteningly little, I suspect. Already our Governor apparently has ExCo doing his bidding. I can’t remember the last time I heard of the Governor proposing something that ExCo rejected. Allow dubious investors to buy up vast tracts of St Helena for their doubtful projects? OK. Destroy fisheries and sell off the fishing rights to people overseas with local groups being officially excluded from the process? Also OK. So if LegCo has been muted and ExCo is no longer challenging what the Governor demands, we really don’t have a democracy here already. Recognising that (and saving a whole ton of money in the process and also improving speed and efficiency) has got to be the obvious next step. St Helena managed without democracy for over 300 years, from colonisation in 1659 until 1963. Should we declare the democratic experiment a waste of resources and consign it to history? I’m sure our councillors can find other jobs. Maybe they could start fishing .....

ERODING OUR DEMOCRACY

ERODING OUR DEMOCRACY

Remember the “ExCo Report”?  Instigated by Governor Gurr to improve democracy, after every ExCo meeting he gave a report of what was discussed and what was decided.

Anybody want to guess when we last had an ExCo Report?

This year there has been not one single ExCo report.  Zero.  The last was after the meeting on 12^th November 2019, and that was only seven paragraphs. Gov. Gurr’s reports sometimes filled two pages of the newspaper.

All we get now is a brief press release summarising the open agenda.  There is no official report of what was agreed.

Given the ExCo recently gave itself the power to make decisions alone, completely bypassing the LegCo Committee Stage, it is now more important than ever that we are told what ExCo is deciding.

Clearly telling the people what their governing body has been up to is no longer a priority.

For the people, BY THE PEOPLE

The consultant Jeremy Sarkin has proposed changes to how democracy works on St Helena.  The Governor says he needs advice on how Saints will feel about these changes, so a body has been set up to advise the Governor.

So far, so good, but how were the members of this body selected?  By public ballot, showing that they are representatives of the people?  No - they were hand picked to serve by the Governor himself.

Does anyone smell a rat?  The Governor will be advised by a bunch of people he himself chose for the role?

Is this a taste of how “democracy” is now to be done on St Helena?

I have nothing personal against the individuals selected but they are not – and cannot be – representatives of the people.  The people can only be represented by people they CHOOSE to represent them.  That is the foundation stone of Democracy.

Fortunately this selected body does not have the final say.  There will have to be a vote of the people before any changes can be made. So I suggest Saints completely ignore what it and the FCO/Governor decide and form an independent view on whether the proposed changes will or will not improve democracy on St Helena, and then vote accordingly.

(Details of the “advisory body” are in yesterday’s (14th May) Sentinel http://www.sams.sh .)

Offline

I used to commute into London by train.  I could have driven but it would have involved getting up more than an hour earlier and parking in London was expensive (and that was in the days before congestion charging added to the bill).  So every morning I arrived at Harpenden station in time for the 07:22 train to London.

Most mornings the train was late – I could probably count on the fingers of one finger the times it was on time – but usually only by a few minutes.  Allowing for further delays along the way I usually got to work sometime between 08:30 and 08:45.

Except that some mornings it was much more seriously delayed.  “Leaves on the line”, “the wrong kind of snow”, “points failure in outer Mongolia”, “train driver abducted by aliens”, the excuses were repeated continuously over the barely-intelligible announcements system.  We got as bored listening to them as doubtless did the poor guy who was paid to keep repeating them.  Nobody, it seems, knew when the problem would be fixed.  There was no estimate available for when our train would arrive and depart.

And to this day I remember that horrendous, deep-gut feeling of utter powerless.  There was no action I could take.  By that time in the morning if I were to give up, get into my car and attempt to drive in I would be unlikely to arrive at my desk before lunchtime.  I had meetings to attend, emails to receive and respond to, papers to read and write, but I could do none of these because of a fire in Basingstoke, or some such, and – most frustrating of all – nobody could tell me how long I would be waiting there.

So the only thing I could do was to stand there and wait, trying to resist the temptation to scream in frustration and kick the timetable board, hoping that somebody would fix whatever problem it was that was delaying our train.  Even if it wasn’t raining (100 commuters – 5mx4m waiting room) I remember those times as some of the most miserable of my life.

I was reminded of them this morning by today’s island-wide Internet failure.

I have, on my PC, 10 emails waiting to be sent, some urgent.  I have things I want – need - to do online.  I can do none of this.  I can’t even check Facebook to see what my friends had for breakfast and who has praised Trump for his masterly handling of the Covid-19 crisis.  I am sat here waiting for somebody to identify and fix the problem and reconnect St Helena to the outside world and I can do absolutely nothing to help make that happen.

On the bright side, I can at least make myself a cup of tea while I’m waiting, and I’m not getting wet or snowed-on, but the frustration at my powerless to improve my situation remains.

If St Helena does have to go on Lockdown due to Covid-19 I fear that our Internet system will not be able to provide the lifeline that has helped every other country to survive.  How will we cope?

Coronavirus measures

In order to prevent infection by the Coronavirus, St Helena is now closed until July. No flights. No cruise ships. No supply ships. No yachts. No air-drops (which might contain infected air). We have teams deployed on the shore to push any floating rubbish that may contain infected air back out to sea and we're also building a big fan to blow the wind back out to sea in case it carries the virus from South Africa. Were building a big tent over the island to deflect potentially-infected rain.

Sadly, no ships means no fuel, of course, so no power - we'll have to shut down all the electronics - hence this will be my last posting.

Goodbye cruel world!

(Is that a suitable non-panicky response?)

Andrew, on BREXIT

My eldest son, Andrew, posted the following this morning on Facebook™.  It so eloquently says what I could not have expressed better myself.

Growing up in many ways I was proud to be British. I looked at my nation as being progressive and, although far from perfect, a generally sensible nation with gun control, healthcare and many things other countries haven’t got right yet.

I looked at Britain as one of the great unifiers; a founder of Europe, the commonwealth and other groups that were going to bring the world together.

That Britain died yesterday. It had been sick for a long time, but is now truly dead.

From today onwards, Britain is no longer a part of building a better world; it has become isolationist, caught up in its own ridiculous feeling of self importance and backward.

Britain now reminds me, not of a proud nation, but of the stereotypical town drunk who sits in the corner of the bar trying to tell stories of his glory days to anyone who might listen.

I know Brexit was “the will of the people” but frankly the people were wrong, the people were lied to and in the end, sadly it is the people, both those who wanted Brexit and those who didn’t, who will now have to suffer the long hard days ahead.

To the old Britain: may she rest in peace. To the new Britain and all of us in the OTs who are dragged along this path, I wish us all good luck – the real work begins now

Be careful what you wish for ....

A lot of nations have experienced the same thing.  In the midst of all the celebrations of their newly-gained Independence someone suddenly realises that they have also lost something – a very important something: someone to blame.

When you leave home you can no longer blame your parents for holding you back.  It’s now all down to you.  The successes are your successes but the failures are also unequivocally yours.  And when a country becomes independent it can no longer blame “the colonial masters” for all the country’s ills.  It has to take responsibility for its own failures.

For many years the BREXITeers have been delighting in blaming the EU for everything that is wrong in Britain and convincing a gullible public that once Britain leaves the EU all the problems will go away and Britain will become a land flowing with milk and honey.

Now they have to deliver on that vision.

“Be careful what you wish for .... you may get it!”