To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

?The hope must be that Tues­day's dis­cus­sions be­tween the Prime Min­is­ter and the Leader of the Op­po­si­tion would re­sult in mean­ing­ful ef­forts, cer­tain­ly in the first in­stance to counter the crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty that has been mak­ing life hell for all of us.

Pre­vi­ous at­tempts at co-op­er­a­tion be­tween the team in gov­ern­ment and the par­ty in op­po­si­tion have had some mea­sure of suc­cess, at least on the ba­sis of pass­ing leg­is­la­tion in the Par­lia­ment. This time Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning has put for­ward a pack­age of six bills, in­clud­ing leg­is­la­tion to sup­press gangs, mon­ey laun­der­ing, wire­tap­ping and to place the Spe­cial An­ti-Crime Unit on a com­plete­ly le­gal ba­sis. The Prime Min­is­ter told re­porters af­ter the meet­ing with Op­po­si­tion Leader Bas­deo Pan­day that the bills would need spe­cial ma­jori­ties which the Gov­ern­ment does not have in Par­lia­ment and there­fore the sup­port of the Op­po­si­tion is vi­tal. Mr Pan­day is too can­ny a politi­cian, too long ex­pe­ri­enced to make any­thing like an out­right com­mit­ment to sup­port­ing the leg­is­la­tion. And com­mon­sense would dic­tate that he could not blind­ly sup­port leg­is­la­tion be­fore it is pre­sent­ed, stud­ied and de­bat­ed in the Par­lia­ment.

How­ev­er, by his own in­di­ca­tion, Mr Pan­day un­der­stands the im­por­tance of the pas­sage of bills to make it pos­si­ble to ap­pre­hend and pros­e­cute crim­i­nals. That there­fore means that Mr Pan­day should be dis­posed to work­ing with the Gov­ern­ment in the Par­lia­ment to fash­ion the le­gal frame­work. But be­yond the leg­isla­tive mea­sures, Mr Pan­day pro­posed what we think could be a use­ful ap­proach, that of a com­mit­tee com­pris­ing peo­ple from all sec­tors of the so­ci­ety to come up with a va­ri­ety of so­lu­tions to the crime prob­lem. That there is wis­dom in all sec­tors of so­ci­ety is be­yond doubt and that com­ing to­geth­er in the na­tion­al in­ter­est can be a use­ful strat­e­gy to dec­i­mate the crim­i­nal men­ace. It goes with­out say­ing that what­ev­er the par­ty in gov­ern­ment, solv­ing and pe­nal­is­ing crime, and tack­ling the deep so­cial prob­lems which en­cour­age most­ly young peo­ple in­to a life of crime, has to be a main pri­or­i­ty of the Gov­ern­ment, Op­po­si­tion and the en­tire so­ci­ety. The ev­i­dence there­fore is that play­ing po­lit­i­cal games over crime is of lit­tle ben­e­fit to any of the par­ties func­tion­ing in lo­cal pol­i­tics of the time. And there is good prece­dent of this kind of ap­proach in the past be­tween the two lead­ers and par­ties and the will­ing­ness of sig­nif­i­cant in­di­vid­u­als and sec­tors of the so­ci­ety to work to­geth­er on such a com­mit­tee.

The oth­er ma­jor is­sue dis­cussed be­tween the lead­ers, the decade-old at­tempt to re­form the Re­pub­li­can Con­sti­tu­tion, is a vi­tal mat­ter. There is gen­er­alised agree­ment be­tween Prime Min­is­ter Man­ning and Op­po­si­tion Leader Pan­day on this need. Mr Man­ning em­barked on a se­ries of pub­lic meet­ings some months ago, ar­gu­ing the ben­e­fits to the coun­try of adopt­ing cer­tain changes to the Con­sti­tu­tion that could make for high­er qual­i­ty gov­er­nance. Mr Pan­day men­tioned in the post-meet­ing brief­ing with the me­dia that con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form will not on­ly bring greater eq­ui­ty and jus­tice to gov­er­nance, but is al­so es­sen­tial to fight­ing crime. On the el­e­ments of the re­form to be pur­sued, how­ev­er, it is well known that the two lead­ers and their par­ties are at op­po­site ends on sev­er­al mat­ters, chief among them be­ing the sys­tem by which a gov­ern­ment is elect­ed. The op­po­si­tion UNC is for a form of pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion and the gov­ern­ing PNM, go­ing back to Dr Williams, has ar­gued that PR will break up the par­ty's ma­jori­ties and cause even greater di­vi­sions in the so­ci­ety. Con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form is there­fore a mat­ter not on­ly for the two but for the en­tire so­ci­ety and the ground is now set for such di­a­logue to take place.