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Friday, July 11, 2025

The persistence of Westminster

by

20140824

"The Colo­nial Of­fice does not need to ex­am­ine its sec­ond-hand colo­nial con­sti­tu­tions. It has a con­sti­tu­tion at hand which it can ap­ply im­me­di­ate­ly to T&T. That is the British Con­sti­tu­tion...Ladies and gen­tle­men, I sug­gest to you that the time has come when the British Con­sti­tu­tion, suit­ably mod­i­fied, can be ap­plied to T&T. Af­ter all, if the British Con­sti­tu­tion is good enough for Great Britain, it should be good enough for T&T."

(Er­ic Williams, Con­sti­tu­tion Re­form in T&T, Pub­lic Af­fairs Pam­phlet No. 2, Teach­ers' Ed­u­ca­tion­al and Cul­tur­al As­so­ci­a­tion, Trinidad, Ju­ly 19, 1955, page 30.)

Nor­man Man­ley took a dif­fer­ent view in ad­dress­ing the Ja­maican House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives on Jan­u­ary 24, 1962:"Let us not make the mis­take of de­scrib­ing as colo­nial, in­sti­tu­tions which are part and par­cel of the her­itage of this coun­try. If we have any con­fi­dence in our own in­di­vid­u­al­i­ty and our own per­son­al­i­ty we should ab­sorb these things and in­cor­po­rate them in­to our be­ing and turn them to our own use as part of the her­itage we are not ashamed of." (Pro­ceed­ings of the Ja­maican House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, 1961-62, page 766.)

Man­ley was ar­gu­ing that colo­nial in­sti­tu­tions that evolved over cen­turies be­long to Ja­maicans and should be ab­sorbed as Ja­maican, while Williams ar­gued that we need­ed to im­port suit­ably mod­i­fied in­sti­tu­tions from West­min­ster.Un­der the Williams nar­ra­tive, there is lit­tle room for al­ter­ation un­less it starts at West­min­ster and is then adapt­ed lo­cal­ly. Un­der the Man­ley nar­ra­tive, there is room for change by virtue of evo­lu­tion.

The cur­rent de­bate about con­sti­tu­tion re­form rais­es the is­sue of whether or not we should make the changes pro­posed. A strong un­der­cur­rent in the de­bate for those who are op­posed is that our mod­el is based on West­min­ster and we should not de­vi­ate from that.

For those who are sup­port­ive of the changes, the main un­der­cur­rent that en­dors­es their view is fur­ther evo­lu­tion of in­sti­tu­tion­al de­vel­op­ment.

When faced with the op­por­tu­ni­ty to un­der­take con­sti­tu­tion re­form af­ter ANR Robin­son and Ver­non Ja­madar had played in­to his hands in 1971 with their no-vote cam­paign, Er­ic Williams ap­point­ed a con­sti­tu­tion com­mis­sion un­der the chair­man­ship of Sir Hugh Wood­ing.

The Wood­ing Com­mis­sion Re­port was re­ject­ed by Williams as some of its pro­pos­als were in­con­sis­tent with the West­min­ster mod­el. Williams then em­barked on his own con­sti­tu­tion re­form process in 1975 with Wil­fred Mc Kell, the DPA, for change in 1976.

In the ear­ly part of this mil­len­ni­um, both Patrick Man­ning and Bas­deo Pan­day were in favour of an ex­ec­u­tive pres­i­den­cy. For­mer prime min­is­ter Man­ning pur­sued this re­form which was a ma­jor de­par­ture from the moor­ings of the West­min­ster mod­el. He laid a "Work­ing Doc­u­ment for Con­sti­tu­tion­al Re­form for Pub­lic Con­sul­ta­tion" in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives on Jan­u­ary 9, 2009.

I was asked to chair the pub­lic con­sul­ta­tions, not as an ad­vo­cate but as a fa­cil­i­ta­tor, to re­ceive the views of the pop­u­la­tion and to re­port on those views. That process com­menced in Oc­to­ber 2009 and was ter­mi­nat­ed as in­com­plete in April 2010 when the Par­lia­ment was dis­solved. I was al­so asked to pre­pare a com­pan­ion mono­graph to ac­com­pa­ny the Work­ing Doc­u­ment for the pub­lic con­sul­ta­tions which was called Chang­ing Our Con­sti­tu­tion.

I as­sessed the pro­posed hy­brid pres­i­den­cy that was be­ing cre­at­ed on pages 32 to 37 of the doc­u­ment. My as­sess­ment in­clud­ed the fol­low­ing :It is clear that the in­ten­tion is to cre­ate a hy­brid par­lia­men­tary-pres­i­den­tial con­sti­tu­tion with par­lia­men­tarism be­ing the dom­i­nant force in the hy­brid." (page 32).

I went fur­ther to state the fol­low­ing on page 33:"The ac­tu­al pres­i­den­cy that is now be­ing pro­posed will be weak­er than the of­fice of Prime Min­is­ter un­der the ex­ist­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al arrange­ments..."I pro­ceed­ed to ex­plain why in greater de­tail down to page 37. Even to­day, it is ap­par­ent that there are some who ei­ther did not read this doc­u­ment or failed to un­der­stand what was said.

The com­mon de­nom­i­na­tor, then and now, is the curb­ing of ex­ec­u­tive pow­er ei­ther through the cre­ation of a Ma­jor­i­ty Leader un­der the Work­ing Doc­u­ment, as I ex­plained, or the im­po­si­tion of term lim­its for the prime min­is­ter and sub­ject­ing even the prime min­is­ter to a re­call pe­ti­tion just like oth­er MPs.

As re­gards the runoff pro­pos­al, there is a philo­soph­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the method from Franklyn Khan, PNM chair­man, and Ash­ton Ford, PNM gen­er­al sec­re­tary, at their press con­fer­ence on No­vem­ber 29, 2012, in an­nounc­ing the PNM re­forms to its par­ty con­sti­tu­tion.

In a re­port by Ria Taitt in the Ex­press on No­vem­ber 30, 2012, chair­man Khan is re­port­ed as say­ing:

"...for the elec­tion of the po­si­tion of po­lit­i­cal leader there would be an in­stant runoff sys­tem. If, for in­stance, three are con­test­ing and Can­di­date A gets 40 per cent, Can­di­date B gets 35 and an­oth­er gets 25, the PNM does not want its po­lit­i­cal leader to be a mi­nor­i­ty leader and there­fore Can­di­date C would drop out and a runoff be­tween A and B would take place." The philo­soph­i­cal va­lid­i­ty of the runoff is ac­cept­ed by the PNM; the pub­lic quar­rel is over the con­tra­dic­tion.


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