Ani­ka Gumbs-San­di­ford

At­tempts to gag Op­po­si­tion MPs in Par­lia­ment is a dan­ger­ous prece­dent which is be­ing set. This is the view of po­lit­i­cal an­a­lysts, who de­scribe Fri­day's move to si­lence Diego Mar­tin Cen­tral MP Amery Browne from con­tin­u­ing his con­tri­bu­tion as an abuse of pow­er. Speak­er Wade Mark de­nied Browne from con­tin­u­ing his con­tri­bu­tion on the An­ti-Gang Bill 2010 on the premise that he was be­ing ir­rel­e­vant.

Dur­ing a news con­fer­ence at his con­stituen­cy of­fice yes­ter­day, Browne said he was not daunt­ed by the move. "The more you try to take away my rights is the more stronger I will be­come. The more you try to si­lence me is the clear­er my voice would be. I fear no one," Browne said. But, ac­cord­ing to Dr Bish­nu Ra­goonath, while MPs need to ad­here and re­main rel­e­vant, Op­po­si­tion MPs should be giv­en a voice.

"It is sim­ply a mat­ter where the Gov­ern­ment is us­ing the ma­jor­i­ty ef­fec­tive­ly to make sure it gets its way in and around Par­lia­ment when Op­po­si­tion mem­bers at­tempt to chal­lenge them. Clear­ly, it is not a trend or prac­tice that should be fol­lowed be­cause it un­der­mines the process of democ­ra­cy," Ra­goonath said.

Al­so chastis­ing the move was po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tist Sel­wyn Ryan, who de­scribed it as "fool­ish­ness." "It is pure fool­ish­ness. The sys­tem is not work­ing prop­er­ly at all. All I would say is that some­thing is def­i­nite­ly not right."