…in cleavages
Well! Well! Well! Boris Johnson’s gamble on calling a snap election has paid off big time for the Tories – but moreso for himself!! With a solid majority of at least 78 seats in the House of Commons and his nearest rival, the Labour Party, over 160 seats away and splintered, Johnson can pretty much write his own ticket. He’d already purged the Conservative Party of his rivals, and replaced them with younger faces who’re completely beholden to him.
But apart from the not inconsequential fact that the Brits can run off an election with 47 MILLION voters in 1½ months, what else can we learn from our erstwhile colonial ruler, who “tutored” us in politics?!! Well, right off the (electoral) bat, we can tell those same tutors that even though they had insisted we should all shrug off our various cultures and assimilate into one (English-dominated) culture…the election clearly shows their own people haven’t heeded that bit of advice!
Anymore!!
When “Britannia ruled the waves”, it was easier to convince the “ethnic” Scots, the Welsh and the Irish (the four kingdoms that made up the “United Kingdom”) about just being “Brits”. They all could lord it over and rule us “natives” in their empire – on which the sun never set. Most of our overseers on the sugar plantations, for instance, were impoverished Irish and Scottish young men who could tower over us.
In democratic politics, where political parties vie for power, the point of the game is to garner the greatest number of votes. The key variable is the main cleavages in the society – along which the parties can mobilise by pushing the “cause” of one or the other self-identified groups. After WWII in Britain, the cleavage of class became dominant, and catapulted the Labour Party over the Tories even with the indomitable Churchill at their helm.
What the Tories have done right now is to create a new line of cleavage: culture — Brits against foreigners — which subsumed the old one of class on the question of Brexit, and threw out all those Poles and others from Eastern Europe. Even the blue collar workers fell into line with the Toffs: it was “us against them”! Lesson for us in Guyana is whether we’ll continue to accept the old cleavage of ethnicity to dominate, or create a new one to subsume it.
With its APNU/AFC coalition, the PNC has accepted the ethnic cleavage, but claims to “bridge” it. The PPP, on the other hand, has defined a new cleavage that subsumes the old ethnic one – competence.
By going after ALL Guyanese – who accept they’re more competent to develop Guyana than the PNC!!
…funds
The PNC are counting their chickens even before the cock has done his job with the hens!! Exxon has already told them that Guyana ain’t getting no oil money till after the elections. You don’t remember what that fella with the degree in “Environmentalism” whom Granger picked to run “Energy” – like picking the lamb to watch the lion!! – said on the subject?? That the first few months of oil will all be taken by the International Oil Companies (IOCs), because they have refineries that can deal with the “higher impurities”!!
But yet the Government has worked over the Governor of the Bank of Guyana to open an account at the NY Fed for the oil revenues to be put into the NRF. Why the rush?? Now, maybe there’s nothing wrong with the NYFed, but since we’ll be paying the IOCs’ income taxes from our 12.5%, does this mean we’ll be cutting a cheque from the NYFed to the GRA?? Just asking!
But isn’t all this moot? As the Opp Leader pointed out: the NRF’s ILLEGAL!!
…at Ferguson’s Buckingham Palace??
Now we can understand why the PNC was so fixated on “corruption” when in opposition. As Freud explained, they were “projecting” what was on their minds onto the “other” – the PPP.
Buckingham Palace was already on Fergie’s mind!!
