To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

?The Prime Min­is­ter's state­ment in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day, os­ten­si­bly on the is­sue of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween church and state, was ex­tra­or­di­nary in a num­ber of ways.

At the most mun­dane lev­el was the fact that the Speak­er al­lowed the Prime Min­is­ter to ad­dress the House for 53 min­utes–which is well be­yond the time that an or­di­nary min­is­ter would be al­lowed to speak. The sec­ond way in which the ad­dress marked some­thing of a wa­ter­shed in the life of T&T's Par­lia­ment was the fact that the Prime Min­is­ter, for the first time, laid bare his own re­li­gious in­cli­na­tions. Mr Man­ning made very per­son­al ref­er­ences to the hymns his moth­er sang at home when he was grow­ing up and the fact that he has sought re­li­gious guid­ance of a very spe­cial kind from born-again preach­ers. It needs to be made very clear that every cit­i­zen of this coun­try has a right to "free­dom of con­science and re­li­gious be­lief and ob­ser­vance" as this is one of the en­shrined rights and free­doms in T&T's 1976 Re­pub­li­can Con­sti­tu­tion. It could nev­er be that the Prime Min­is­ter en­joys less free­dom of re­li­gious be­lief than every oth­er cit­i­zen of this coun­try. The prob­lem aris­es when the re­li­gious be­liefs and ob­ser­vances of a politi­cian be­gin to in­fringe on the politi­cian's sec­u­lar man­age­ment of the State.

For all the pas­sion­ate de­fence of his be­liefs and his right to seek spir­i­tu­al guid­ance from whomev­er he wish­es, the Prime Min­is­ter re­vealed that the Cab­i­net which he chairs went to ex­tra­or­di­nary lengths to en­sure that the born-again Chris­t­ian group in ques­tion got le­gal ac­cess to the par­tic­u­lar plot of land in the Heights of Gua­napo. Mr Man­ning made the point, quite ef­fec­tive­ly, that the trans­fer of state land to re­li­gious bod­ies had be­come some­thing of a tra­di­tion, out­lin­ing near­ly 20 in­stances of such. But it is like­ly that the Prime Min­is­ter would be hard-pressed to find in the post-in­de­pen­dence his­to­ry of this coun­try any oth­er in­stance in which a Cab­i­net of this re­pub­lic took two de­ci­sions in 15 months to ef­fect the trans­fer of state land to a small re­li­gious body. The sec­ond de­ci­sion be­came nec­es­sary be­cause the plan­ning au­thor­i­ties turned down the first ap­pli­ca­tion to have the land sub-di­vid­ed. And, even giv­en the en­tire re­sources of the Pub­lic Ser­vice avail­able to him, the Prime Min­is­ter may be hard-pressed to find an­oth­er in­stance in which the Cab­i­net ap­proved a quit no­tice to oc­cu­pants of land that the Cab­i­net clear­ly wished to make avail­able to this church. And it was the Prime Min­is­ter who re­vealed to Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day the fact that the Gov­ern­ment was pre­pared to take le­gal ac­tion to get the squat­ters to va­cate this spe­cial plot of land and the in­ter­ven­tion of a "bene­fac­tor" who paid sums to avoid a con­fronta­tion.

The fact that the Cab­i­net was so amenable to bend­ing over back­wards to ac­com­mo­date this con­gre­ga­tion–even in the ab­sence of the Prime Min­is­ter from its meet­ings on the sub­ject–must be of some sig­nif­i­cance. It is ex­tra­or­di­nary as well that the Prime Min­is­ter seemed to have used the state­ment to send a mes­sage to the Town and Coun­try Plan­ning Di­vi­sion. Mr Man­ning said that the di­vi­sion had tak­en a de­ci­sion not to ap­prove con­struc­tion on the land based on a "false premise" that the land did not be­long to the in­di­vid­ual mak­ing the ap­pli­ca­tion. But, ac­cord­ing to the Prime Min­is­ter, as it now turns out the Cab­i­net Note had been brought to the at­ten­tion of Town and Coun­try Plan­ning and "they are now in a po­si­tion to con­duct the busi­ness prop­er­ly." This might be con­strued as a not-so-sub­tle in­struc­tion to the plan­ning di­vi­sion to ap­prove the on­go­ing con­struc­tion of the $30 mil­lion church on the land and do so quick­ly. The ques­tion that the Prime Min­is­ter must an­swer–and we would nev­er be so bold as to set a dead­line for him–is has he al­lowed the re­la­tion­ship with his spir­i­tu­al ad­vis­er to af­fect the process with re­spect to the dis­tri­b­u­tion of state land?