January 30, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
Powerless in our own country
If we were rocked by corruption a la Turks & Caicos, we’d struggle to straighten it out
The scary part of this sorry saga, to me, isn't that the British intervened, but that the Turks & Caicos Islanders didn't intervene themselves.
Why didn't they? Or why couldn't they?
Didn't they care? Did they lack courage? Or did they simply lack the power to do anything?
And here's an even more important question.
What would we, as Bermudians, do if we were in the same kind of situation? Would we care? Would we have the strength or the courage or the ability to straighten up our own affairs?
The answer, I fear, is no. We would not.
It's not that we're weak or disinterested, though sometimes we are. It's not that our governments are somehow more evil or manipulative than others.
It's just that we don't have the checks and balances any country needs.
Our Westminster system of government is an "elective dictatorship", as the U.K. Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, described it in the 1970s.
It concentrates power in the hands of a very few Cabinet ministers who, from one election to the next, have almost nothing to stand in their way.
While there are rules - laws, in some cases, and policies and procedures in others - the "powers that be" have the power to change or ignore them.
They operate behind closed doors, for the most part, protected from scrutiny.
In most other places, government backbench MPs are so numerous that that they form a powerful source of scrutiny and oversight to the government itself.
In the U.K., for example, there are 23 people sitting in Cabinet, and another 100 assorted junior ministers.
That leaves more than 200 government backbenchers to keep an eye on the Government.
In Bermuda, by contrast, nine of the Government's 22 MPs sit in the Cabinet, one is their "enforcer" as Government whip, and one is the Speaker. That leaves just 11 government backbenchers.
Which seriously diminishes Bermuda's ability to oversee itself, because Government backbenchers are more powerful watchdogs than any official Opposition.
They are privy to more "inside" information, so they are usually better-informed than the Opposition. They have closer friendships and working relationships with Cabinet Ministers, so they can have greater influence over them.
And when a Government goes astray, backbench rebellions have far more power than Opposition outbursts. They have the power to humiliate the Government, or topple a Premier, by withdrawing their support.
But this power is undermined, in Bermuda, by their tiny numbers.
This is a structural problem, I should emphasize, rather than failings peculiar to either the PLP or the UBP.
Both the UBP and PLP leadership, in power, ensured that the backbench was outnumbered, and neutered by the promise of future Cabinet salaries.
And both the UBP and PLP, in Opposition, have had so little power and resources and numbers that they seemed like pathetic and irrelevant bleaters.
Which is not what you want, when you want to ensure your government is run well, without U.K. intervention.
Is it really this bad? No, it's worse. Our Senate is very small and (like the House of Assembly) completely devoid of research staff. It can, at best, delay non-financial legislation, for a few months. It is hard for the Senate to be much more than a rubber stamp.
Our Governor's signature is pretty much a rubber stamp as well, like the Queen's signature on legislation in the UK.
Unless the U.K. feels forced into a major Turks & Caicos style intervention, the Governor's real practical powers are largely limited to polite lecturing - as the arrival of the four Uyghurs from Guantanamo Bay reminded us.
Bermuda's small size cripples the ability of other bodies to provide guidance and scrutiny.
The media is tiny. Even Bermuda's largest news organization, The Royal Gazette, lacks the resources to run anything approaching a prolonged, detailed investigation.
The police, in a small place like Bermuda, struggle to find the resources to sustain complicated investigations into public crimes and misdemeanours.
And as the Bermuda Housing Corporation scandal showed a few years ago, our laws on public corruption are woefully inadequate and outdated.
The Auditor General, as we have seen in recent years, lacks the resources to stand up, in a sustained and enforceable way, against a recalcitrant Government.
Environmental groups, business organizations, and so many other potential pressure groups lack the resources for research, public campaigns and lobbying that would be routine in larger democratic countries.
Furthermore, anyone attempting to do research - or even to keep well-informed of what is going on - is handicapped by an astounding lack of transparency.
There is, so far, no freedom of information act. Government decisions are routinely made behind closed doors. There is an extraordinary lack of consultation, in private and in public.
Parliamentary committees meet behind closed doors, if in fact they actually exist and meet. Even Members of Parliament don't have access to the information they need to make sound policy decisions.
The system makes it hard for them to do anything but blindly follow their own party's official line and automatically dismiss criticism - even when they know the criticism is justified.
It's all understandable, given the way our size and our system restrains us.
But it gives little assurance that any Bermuda government gets anything like the scrutiny and oversight that good government requires.
All this would make it hard to intervene if a government was running this country off the rails.
It isn't that Bermudians are weaker than voters in other democracies.
No, we are the victims of our size and our system.
We can't change our size.
Our best and only hope is to have the strength to change our system.
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