A Discussion Site for Good Governance and Corruption in Public Life Issues in the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla in the West Indies, moderated by Don Mitchell CBE QC, of PO Box 83, Anguilla, British West Indies. Email me with your comments and contributions at: idmitch@anguillanet.com.
The Law and You. When I was a High Court judge in St Vincent back in 1999, Parnel Campbell had a TV programme. He called it, as I recall, “The Law and You”. It aired weekly. In it, he explained various areas of the law of St Vincent and the Grenadines to his viewers. It was a very popular programme. I thought it was brilliant. I wondered what it would be like to imitate it in Anguilla. So, when Wycliffe Richardson of atv3 spoke to me about doing a popular law programme for Chanel 3 TV, I jumped at it. He has asked me to keep him at least two programmes in hand. I readily complied.
Wycliffe now tells me that the broadcasts have started on channel 3 TV.
I know that they will not be as well done as Parnel’s. hope they will be of some interest. And, as people begin to ask me to cover various areas of law, they may get more interesting.
My modest proposal. The earth heads inexorably towards its seven billionth human inhabitant. The forecast date for arriving at this figure is just one year away, 2011. The world faces universal overpopulation. A full 97% of global growth is happening in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. So says the Population Reference Bureau’s 2009 World Population Data Sheet. Eight in ten of today’s 1.5 billion youth live in developing countries. Over 1 billion people lack access to clean water. Over 2.5 billion lack a toilet facility of any kind. Nearly one in four people live on less than US$1 per day. Nearly 3 billion struggle to survive on US$2 per day. The WHO estimates that one-third of the world is under-fed, and another one-third is starving. Over 4 million will die from hunger this year alone.
One has to wonder, into what sort of world are today’s Anguillian babies being born? What fate awaits them as the land comes one day soon to resemble nothing more than the body of a dying dog, with the people nothing more than ticks and flees escaping from the cooling body?
Since 1958, we have known what happens to rats in a cage even with an unlimited supply of food and water. As population increases, social behaviour degenerates. The well-fed but crowded out rats kill each other in a frenzy of destruction. We won't have the luxury of unlimited food and water.
We have searched high and low for the answer. We tried bird flu. That turned out to be a wimp. We tried swine flu. It only made the pharmaceutical companies richer. The plague epidemic worked in the Middle Ages. All attempts to revive it have crashed in failure. Even HIV has not been the panacea we all looked forward to.
All hope is not lost. When the seal population explodes in Canada, they compete with the fishermen for fish. Canadians know how to deal with the problem. They cull them. Namibia has hit on the same solution to the problem. In Canada alone, a quarter of a million a year is the minimum. I question why we have not more effectively implemented this obvious solution to the human population problem.
Ruanda is the most densely populated country in Africa, and they have proved that a cull can give relief, if only temporarily. In 1994 up to 1 million of the then 7.5 million inhabitants were killed by their neighbours. Its current population of 8.5 million is set to double to 16 million by 2020 at its current growth rate. Some 70% live below the poverty line. Soon, another cull will be necessary.
Ethnic cleansing is one possible solution. In Europe the Christian Serbs showed how easily it can be accomplished:
Not to be outdone, the Muslim militia of Kosovo did their bit to help their Serbian neighbours enjoy a little more breathing room:
Religion is definitely our best hope. With the Christians killing Jews and Moslems, and Moslems killing Jews and Christians, all that is left for success to be achieved is for Jews to add Christians to their present list. We should all start going to church and become as fervent as we possibly can. I am encouraging it.
And then I woke up with a start. Was it only a bad dream, or a prescient sense of foreboding?
Intolerance can be a virtue. Reading Move Any Mountain, I was reminded again that intolerance can be a worthwhile virtue. The Christian mountebanks, who take time off from their child and spousal abuse to lead their gullible congregations in celebrating Christmas, are well aware that the only significant events of the month of December 2009 were the Winter Solstice and the Blue Moon. May the Christian fundamentalists rot in hell for all eternity! The Muslim clerics, busy encouraging the young men of the ummah to blow themselves up in defence of their religious wasteland, should be helped to check out the 70 virgins for themselves. Allah has reserved the hottest part of hell for them. The Zionist zealots, stealing the ancestral villages of the Palestinians, deserve the death and destruction that they so eagerly await. Jehovah will surely condemn them to everlasting Gehenna. The greasy politicians, engorging themselves at the expense of their gullible supporters, will inevitably stand condemned to life at hard labour in the salt mines.
Is there any risk in voting in a brand new administration for Anguilla in 2010, none of whom has ever served in government before? The answer is, of course not. When the Torries win power in England in 2010, I doubt that one of the new Ministers will ever have served before. Every one of them will be first timers, and they will serve efficiently and well. If they follow the rules of the Westminster System.
Under our system of government, Ministers should rely on their Permanent Secretaries and their competent, trained, permanent staff to do the actual work of each Department. Ministers are not expected to do the detailed work of any Department or Ministry. They are not supposed to get involved in the details of administration. Ministers are only expected to lay down policy, and to supervise how the administration carries out their policy decisions.
The mistake we made in the past was perversely to permit Ministers to interfere in the details of administration. Ministers made planning decisions for individual projects, instead of setting down a policy and leaving it to the administration to carry out the policy. The Chief Minister decided who should get a work permit instead of an expert committee carrying out government policy. The result was that his friends got work permits, and the rest sucked salt. The Chief Minister, by abusing his work permit powers, decided which thieving employee could be fired by a hotel or restaurant, not the mediation and judicial system set up by the labour law. There are a dozen other examples of this type of mismanagement that any one of us could cite. It has gone on for some 15 years.
The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who should have known better, permitted us to mis-govern ourselves in this way. Their School of Government was ready and willing to come in and give training in the role and responsibilities of Ministers and the administration. Instead, our politicos were permitted to create their own half-cocked system that we now have. That is why I say that a great deal of the responsibility for the lack of any principled government in Anguilla over the past 15 years lies on the Governors' heads.
If the system is allowed to work correctly, the way it was intended to, there is in my view absolutely no risk in having a clean sweep in government this year.
Why we should all move our money to indigenous banks. I was interested to read recently about the grassroots movement that is spreading across the USA to abandon the major banks and for all customers to move their accounts to community banks. In our islands that would translate to “indigenous” banks.
Here is the video that started what I expect will, in the coming months, be a groundswell of change in banking practices around the world:
It is not just the conviction that many of us have that our small indigenous banks are safer than the major international banks. There are small people with immediate, personal reasons for moving. Here, as an example, is Stephanie Frost, one irate Bank of America customer, explaining what she is doing:
To cite Camden R Fine, our community or indigenous banks take time to get to know their customers. They make loans to the small businesses in the community that the larger banks won’t touch. Their continued success depends on building and maintaining good relationships with their customers. Indigenous bankers are accountable. They have to be. Often they are dealing with their neighbours, the parents of their children’s friends, the people they see every day during their personal and professional lives. They rely on common-sense practices, honesty, integrity, accountability and transparency.
The same cannot be said of the management of the Banks of America, Citigroups, Wells Fargos, et al.
We still have not been told why the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank is suggesting that the National Bank of Anguilla needs to merge with the Caribbean Commercial Bank. In frustration at the lack of published information I have been doing a little digging. Someone suggested I have a look at C Hoare & Co. Hoare’s, like the National Bank, is a small bank. Neither deals in derivatives. Both provide private banking, financial planning and investment services that include loans, mortgages, savings accounts and investment advisory services.
Hoare’s 2008/2009 accounts have been published. So have NBA's accounts. Hoare’s has just ₤1 billion in assets. NBA has just EC$1 billion in assets. The international recession started in December 2007, and hit both banks simultaneously. Hoare’s profits show a decrease from 2007 to 2008. Profits went down from ₤17 million the previous year to ₤15 million. NBA’s went down from EC$19 million to EC$17 million. The ratio of fall in profits is astonishingly similar.
Hoare’s was founded in 1672, some 20 years before the Bank of England (founded 1694). Hoare’s is the oldest private bank in the UK. It is considered a very successful bank. Yet, it is tiny by comparison with other British banks. It has survived one financial crisis after another, while the banking behemoths around the world were failing.
It does not matter how small a local bank is. All that matters is how carefully it is managed. If it is not carefully managed it does not matter how big it is, it will still fail.
So long as any small local bank is taking two-thirds of the profits each year and putting them into reserves, it will do well.
This assumes that it is not making too many dodgy loans.
The big question in the tourism industry of Anguilla today is how long can Cap Juluca afford to carry the golf course? Even Adam Aron’s backers will run out of money and patience one day. You work out the math. The figures were widely circulated a year ago when Flag Luxury Resorts was threatening to shut down the course. It was said to cost US$6,000 per day just to water the grass. That is US$180,000 per month. There are other costs besides the water. Another figure widely circulated was that Flag lost US$3.9 million on the course in the last year of operations. That is US$300,000 per month. And the story in circulation is that Cap Juluca has promised to keep the course open for up to six months. Keeping that promise would cost them between US$1 and US$2 million in operating costs. At US$225 per round, between 44 and 88, say 66, golfers per day will have to be found just to break even. Given the uncertainties, it is not likely that many golfers are going to visit Anguilla for the purpose of playing golf. Certainly, few will bear the burden of bringing their clubs with them. Business will have to depend on the occasional drop-in. The course will be lucky to attract even 10% of the numbers required to break even.
It will have become obvious to Cap Juluca before the end of January that good money is only being poured after bad.
I don’t think Cap Juluca is in the charity business.
The well is never bottomless.
We are reminded that the lunch is never free.
And, Santa Claus does not exist.
I would not be so pessimistic if I thought this was anything other than a very expensive campaign contribution.
