JavaScript is disabled in your web browser or browser is too old to support JavaScript. Today almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable.

Thursday, July 10, 2025

Lon­don Call­ing

Second world problems

by

20131211

"This is a third world coun­try," I hear tri­nis say. When I dis­agree–point­ing to the thou­sands of SU­Vs, huge oil drilling in­dus­try, for­eign in­vest­ment, US-style shop­ping malls, golf cours­es, the speed at which ur­ban roads are paved (putting Britain's lo­cal coun­cils to shame), free ed­u­ca­tion, sub­sidised en­er­gy bills, wa­ter, fu­el, med­i­cine–the re­sponse is usu­al­ly, "Well, they tell us we're still a third world coun­try." They, mean­ing the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, IMF or the World Bank.

I won­der whether it will com­fort Tri­nis to hear UK Guardian colum­nist Aditya Chakrabort­ty this week de­scribe the UK as a de­vel­op­ing coun­try too? Per­haps a sense of Schaden­freude that the old colo­nial mas­ter is on his knees while mon­ey floods through this once en­slaved colony?

Di­rect com­par­isons be­tween the qual­i­ty of life and cost of liv­ing in re­al terms be­tween the UK and T&T is dif­fi­cult. There are in­dex­es to re­fer to. GDP, av­er­age in­come the pover­ty in­dex etc but sta­tis­tics can be used to prove or dis­prove ideas.

While salaries are low­er here, the cost of liv­ing is much cheap­er (con­sumer prices in­clud­ing rent are 45 per cent low­er than the UK).

The CIA World Fact­book says 17 per cent of the T&T pop­u­la­tion lives be­low the pover­ty line com­pared to 14 per cent of the UK pop­u­la­tion. That's pret­ty close for a sup­posed third world coun­try vs a glob­al su­per­pow­er.

What does a "de­vel­op­ing coun­try" mean in re­al­i­ty? The term third world is out­dat­ed, coined dur­ing the Cold War when Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope were clas­si­fied as First World, the com­mu­nist So­vi­et Bloc as Sec­ond World and Africa, Asia, South Amer­i­ca as Third World. Pro­pa­gan­da used to sug­gest cap­i­tal­ism was the pre­ferred so­cio-eco­nom­ic sys­tem.

I've been to de­vel­op­ing coun­tries in West Africa and the Mid­dle East. The in­fra­struc­ture, em­ploy­ment rates and mod­ernised facets of T&T life are in­com­pa­ra­ble to those in Ghana or Syr­ia. You don't walk in­to pub­lic bath­rooms in those coun­tries and find mo­tion-sen­sor sink taps, au­to flush­ing toi­lets and sani­tised bath­rooms. In Syr­ia, you feel thank­ful the toi­let is a w/c not a hole in the ground. Mil­lions of peo­ple live in tiny shacks with tin roofs, so­cial hous­ing is non ex­is­tent. Beg­gars on the streets nu­mer­ous, many in need of med­ical help.

Here, even those liv­ing in HDC work­ing ap­par­ent­ly low paid jobs in re­tail or, ahem, jour­nal­ism, fly back and forth from New York or Mi­a­mi like tak­ing the bus.

Some say Tri­nis can't af­ford these lux­u­ries (cars, air trav­el etc) and that they live in debt. The UK is one of the world's debt cap­i­tals. We live in our over­drafts and by month end we're lucky if our bank ac­counts are on­ly -�1,000. We stack up debt on cred­it cards and pay it back in tiny amounts.

Rent­ing a room in Lon­don costs �600-700 ($6,000-7,000) a month. My tiny stu­dio flat com­mands rent of �1,040 a month ($10,400). Quite ob­scene. Here I share a beau­ti­ful apart­ment in Cas­cade for a quar­ter of that price.

Fill­ing a car with petrol in Eng­land costs �60-80 ($600-800). Here it costs $120. UK gas and elec­tric­i­ty bills av­er­age �110 ($1,100) a month. Here in T&T that would keep you go­ing for three months.

Ed­u­ca­tion is free here and T&T has one of the high­est lit­er­a­cy rates in the world, send­ing dozens of schol­ar­ship win­ners to over­seas uni­ver­si­ties every year. The Pub­lic Health Ser­vice is not with­out its prob­lems but British hos­pi­tals and stan­dards of care are just as much of a lot­tery; over­stretched and un­der re­sourced the NHS is on the point of col­lapse. Pa­tients go in­to hos­pi­tal for rou­tine op­er­a­tions and die from con­tract­ing hos­pi­tal-borne dis­eases like MR­SA be­cause hos­pi­tals are un­clean. There are count­less NHS hor­ror sto­ries.

Leav­ing aside the ex­tremes of pover­ty and wealth, eg Beetham Gar­dens (which may be mar­gin­al­ly ma­te­ri­al­ly worse off than a Glas­gow ten­e­ment hous­ing project) and La­dy Chan­cel­lor Rd (which might be slight­ly less rich than Kens­ing­ton & Chelsea) the av­er­age work­ing class or mid­dle class trini­is, in my opin­ion, at least on a par with the equiv­a­lent in Britain, if not bet­ter off.

Trinidad is of­ten de­scribed as a ba­nana re­pub­lic, re­ly­ing sole­ly on one prod­uct's ex­por­ta­tion for eco­nom­ic sta­bil­i­ty and with prof­its go­ing to those in pow­er. Chakrabort­ty says of Britain, "Even ba­nana re­publics have cash: it just ends up in the hands of a very few peo­ple," then ex­plains how the UK is no dif­fer­ent.

One is of course aware that the mon­ey in T&T (thanks to the black gold ooz­ing from the ground) is fi­nite and one hopes the gov­ern­ment is putting lots away for the bust times not frit­ter­ing it away dur­ing boom. If Eng­land and T&T are on a par then what's left to de­cide is whether both are "de­vel­oped" or "de­vel­op­ing", first world or third. Let's cut our loss­es and say we're both sec­ond world. Fair's fair.

?


Related articles

Sponsored

Weather

PORT OF SPAIN WEATHER

Sponsored