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THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC Pires

AMBITIOUS young Trinidadians often threaten to “put Trinidad on the world map” (usually with dreadful soca songs) while their Tobagonian counterparts tend to actually quietly do it on a huge scale (like Dwight Yorke winning the UEFA championship in Fergie time in 1999, or whoever the serial killer is who’s murdered seven elderly white people in their own homes – although, for that infamy to pinpoint Scarborough, the Tobago police would have to solve the case).
Now there’s no doubting Trinidad’s widespread cultural influence when the world’s largest musical street festivals – Notting Hill, Brooklyn, Toronto, many more – are all modelled on our own Trinidad Carnival; and a new one seems to pop up in a new city every year.
But who would have thought that Trinidad and Tobago’s most powerful influential force from behind the bridge to across the border would be our politicians? Not our musicians, athletes, chefs, writers, artists, surgeons, scientists, sports people? Who would have thought our guabines and guppies from this little political backwater would outperform the New York Times-rated shark-and-bake for making the world sit up and take notice of Trinidad and Tobago? And then copy us, too besides?
Look at the Tory party leadership circus coming to a head like a pus-filled abscess in the UK this week. The election of a new Conservative leader has only happened because the old one, BoJo the Clown, was so entirely unfit for the role in the first place that he had to be sacked.
Tell me that doesn’t have a Patrick Manning/Keith Rowley and/or Basdeo Panday/Kamla Persad-Bissessar ring to it.
But go deeper.
In the UK, as in TT, massive social issues constitute a real and immediate existential national threat. In both places, most people are paying most of their money just to keep the roof over their heads and something in their bellies. In St Ann’s as in Streatham, you actually contemplate buying ganja for your children instead of greens because it’s cheaper.
And neither government of either place can do a single damned thing to help you, except promise you the world and raise your taxes.
And the only reason either government is there is because they’ve managed to trick enough people that a very bad idea is really a good one. (And a 52-48 or 21-20 split is a landslide for them.) In Trinidad, no matter how badly they squander the energy industry tax, people re-elect the PNM because they’re African or the UNC because they’re Indian; and policy and accountability go out the door hand in hand.
Similarly, in the UK, the Tories won a “stonking” majority because enough dotish elderly English people thought Brexit, the imposition of economic sanctions upon itself by Britain, was actually “independence.” (Almost 70 per cent of Stoke-on-Trent voted Leave; under European colonial domination, Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire would have been eligible for £150 million-plus EU funding; after Brexit “independence,” the Vote Leave government is offering them £11 million.)
But if you really want the penny to drop that UK politics is copying the TT version free sheet, consider the line-up vying for the backdoor PM-work. Not one of them is likely to be as positively bad for the country as Johnson but, like Johnson, not one of them has any idea at all, bar hating Europeans and deporting refugees. This week’s fires destroyed 40 homes in London alone because, inter alia, firefighters lacked relatively cheap essential equipment while friends of the Vote Leave government pocketed billions of pounds from contracts for the supply of unusable covid19 personal protective equipment.
Tell me that doesn’t sound like a PNM or UNC state contract!
Milo Minderbender would have blushed for shame! (Joseph Heller’s fictional character in Catch-22 bombed his own WWII American base in the Pacific on behalf of the Germans for cost plus ten per cent.)
Of course, there is a chance that our old Mother Country may correct itself in a couple of years – or, if Liz Truss becomes backdoor prime minister, a couple of months – when the British electorate gets the equivalent of the NAR’s 1986 chance to “vote them out.”
But they’ll soon find what we’ve known for decades: once you get onto the Trinidad development path, the only way forward is back. It will only be a matter of time before, at the height of a crisis, all they can do is throw parties.

BC Pires is reading the spinning out of control. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com
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