Richard Lord

With no for­mal Op­po­si­tion elect­ed to the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly, Chief Sec­re­tary Orville Lon­don is be­ing strong­ly ad­vised to lis­ten to the op­po­si­tion voic­es on the streets and so­cial me­dia.

Po­lit­i­cal an­a­lyst Dr Win­ford James said yes­ter­day that Mon­day's clean sweep at the polls by the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) was a loss for democ­ra­cy, and in a de­mo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem all voic­es must be heard. He said this must be done "if on­ly to achieve bal­ance in the de­ci­sion-mak­ing process of those who lead."

James said there could be a hege­mon­ic sit­u­a­tion if one par­ty were al­lowed to al­ways pre­vail. He said one must now de­cide if the tra­di­tion­al par­ty po­si­tion would pre­vail in the As­sem­bly, or as­sem­bly­men would be al­lowed to speak and vote on con­science. In a tele­phone in­ter­view, James said there would still be "an in­for­mal op­po­si­tion in the pop­u­la­tion and that op­po­si­tion will have its say on is­sues that are go­ing to arise."

He added: "Even if there is no for­mal op­po­si­tion in the As­sem­bly, there will be an in­for­mal op­po­si­tion in the pop­u­la­tion out­side of the As­sem­bly." He not­ed that even if there were an op­po­si­tion in the As­sem­bly it would not be enough as the Gov­ern­ment, with the ma­jor­i­ty of dis­tricts, al­ways had its way.

The elec­tion re­sult height­ened the need for con­sti­tu­tion­al re­form, he said, "to en­sure the voic­es of dif­fer­ent groups in the so­ci­ety are heard and de­ci­sions are in­formed by those voic­es." He said he was not speak­ing about au­ton­o­my but struc­tures with­in to al­low peo­ple's voic­es to count when ma­jor na­tion­al is­sues were be­ing dis­cussed. He ad­vised that TOP leader Ash­worth Jack has no op­tion but to re­sign.

He added: "It was an elec­tion for him to win. He lost it by wide mar­gins and he should re­sign." He said the TOP lost the elec­tion be­cause Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar "took over the TOP's cam­paign from the TOP." Last week's Sun­day Guardian re­port­ed James as say­ing the TOP could on­ly win alone and not as part of the rul­ing coali­tion.

"It be­came con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed by as­so­ci­a­tion with the PP," he added. Lon­don has to give se­ri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion to con­cerns raised by the TOP af­ter his elec­tion vic­to­ry, he said, warn­ing that the Chief Sec­re­tary should not move to vic­timise and ex­clude those who did not sup­port the PNM in the cam­paign.

James sug­gest­ed Lon­don should use the sit­u­a­tion to build democ­ra­cy on the is­land.