You know you’re in Barbados when the Prime Minister himself runs up a red flag about the feared impact on Caribbean tourism of a new British travel-tax increase. Counting the tax rise, UK vacationers will find it more expensive to fly to the Caribbean than to Hawaii. This is the finding of Barbadian number-crunchers, who reckon that the cost to a British family of a Caribbean vacation will rise by as much as £400. Maybe this piece of intelligence has been picked up by the radar of Tobago House of Assembly tourism watchers. After the August Bacolet cutlass attack on a British couple, and last week’s murder of a German, a well-founded fear of criminal violence already figures among the risks weighed by would-be visitors from Europe. Now, if it’s actually going to cost them more to worry about who’s watching their sun-exposed backs at King’s Bay, is the idea of a Tobago vacation still attractive to those seeking a winter escape?

Prime Minister David Thompson was, last week, minding Barbados’ own business when he warned about the tax hike: “We have a lot to suffer in the event that it is implemented.” That tourism is the business of Barbados remains obvious on an island where projected climate-change effects on sea levels and temperatures were making banner headlines last week. That tourism is also Tobago’s business more and more attains the status of an inconvenient truth, on the way to becoming outdated. At the Cove complex opening, last month, Prime Minister Patrick Manning advertised Tobago’s future as an exporter of natural gas. THA spokesmen painted a high-wage, energy-industry picture, implying Tobago’s eventual adoption of that familiar Trinidad indifference to tourism. Meanwhile, Barbados’ Prime Minister called on other, equally-threatened, Caribbean “destinations” to join his lobby against the tourism-damaging travel tax.

Mr Thompson is probably not holding his breath in expectation of support from Port-of-Spain or, from now equally energy-fixated, Scarborough. Happy T&T energy-based exceptionality to regional economic and financial predicaments, and also natural disasters, is now a familiar aspect of the Caribbean reality. Bridgetown, bustling, and tourist-friendly, its streets and sidewalks swept and well-paved, its vagrants mostly out of sight, cheerfully accepts also being a “destination” for T&T investment. Not really jesting about T&T’s prominence in Barbadian economy and finance, a high-ranking journalist said to me last week: “Sometimes, people here say Port-of-Spain is also the capital of Barbados.” A probably rueful overstatement of the case: that’s a consummation not devoutly to be wished in either country.
T&T needs Barbados as a calm, well-ordered destination, distant enough from the Bocas, for investment, exports, and for migration.

Bemused Barbadians have concluded that, without their unsought, but well-meaning input, “Trinis” are best placed to handle the continuous tumults and contentions of our own creation. Once again, in my own three-day passage to Barbados last week, I felt we may have something to learn from that tidily predictable little country. Where the milieu of T&T public affairs operates on the jolts-per-minute rule—something is always sensationally amiss—Barbados, for most of the time, is relatively un-newsworthy. Compared to T&T, the daily papers are thin, and oddly short on news. Dozing past reports of speeches by government and other officials, a T&T visitor wonders: does nothing really happen here? An eye-catching story broke last week. A hospital patient claimed that, while asleep in the ward, he had been mistakenly pronounced dead, and put in the morgue.

Coming to, he separated himself from the bodies hopelessly consigned to the morgue’s refrigerator shelves, and got out to tell his story. It’s the kind of story I could imagine being reported, sadly but somehow hilariously, from one of the institutions within the portfolio of the luckless Jerry Narace. With my T&T background, against the strenuous denials of the hospital authorities, I gave the patient 50 per cent of the benefit of doubt. It struck me that, so far from our learning from them, Barbadians may be picking up some of T&T’s bad ways. “Why can’t we get it right the first time?” The Nation’s editorial headline wailed. Then it reviewed a series of inadequately-planned, or delayed projects, with a dramatic climax in the criticised redo of the Barbados Supreme Court. A Barbadian lawyer quoted by the editorial voiced exasperation of the kind heard in Port-of-Spain from specialist users of the Customs and Excise and the Performing Arts buildings: “We were not asked one question prior to or during construction and outfitting.”

Ears ringing with talk about Sports Minister’s Gary Hunt $2-million super flag, I found Barbados preparing a flag party of its own—its November 30 Independence anniversary. Blue and gold national flags bedeck public places and roundabouts. But what’s promoted as “the largest flag in Barbados” measures 20 feet by 30 feet (as against Mr Hunt’s 60 by 36). Not for Barbados the damn-the-expense Trini public-sector style. The flag expressing plus-size Barbadian patriotism is, in fact, a private business initiative. It’s proudly hoisted in the name of Simmons Electrical, which gains press photo mileage for its offer of “sales and services” in St Philip. Still, Barbados’ flag parties look ever more familiar to T&T eyes. A “Bajan Brew” festival, starting the Independence month, featured not only steelband and calypso, but also an Indo-Barbadian dance troupe.