From the mo­ment Jack Warn­er broke ties with the UNC he mount­ed a blaz­ing at­tack on the ca­bal which he claims is con­trol­ling the Prime Min­is­ter; a claim that a group of four top UNC MPs seek to in­flu­ence the PM in im­por­tant de­ci­sions, in­clud­ing those against him.

To a great ex­tent this was a con­sis­tent theme through­out his cam­paign. While he at­tacked the ca­bal fear­less­ly, he was gen­tler to the PM. In fact, his cam­paign seemed to be more fo­cused on the work­ings of the ca­bal than the UNC can­di­date who should have been his more di­rect op­po­nent. As each mem­ber of the ca­bal at­tempt­ed to re­but his al­le­ga­tions, Warn­er was able to ef­fec­tive­ly coun­ter­act and nul­li­fy their ar­gu­ments.

It ap­pears that the ca­bal pro­vid­ed a ba­sis for Jack to mount his cam­paign. On re­flec­tion one is left to won­der whether the ca­bal was main­ly re­spon­si­ble for the ILP's vic­to­ry. Could Warn­er's vic­to­ry be in­ter­pret­ed that the Ch­agua­nas West con­stituents see the ca­bal as not just con­trol­ling the pow­er of the UNC but al­so the pow­er of the state? And, as sug­gest­ed by Warn­er, the re­sources of the state are be­ing shared by just a few, their friends and their fam­i­lies?

If this is the per­cep­tion, then the PM has a re­al prob­lem on her hand. She must now be con­sid­er­ing very care­ful­ly the val­ue of the ca­bal to her. Some have ad­vo­cat­ed that she may al­ready be aware of this. Are the re­sults an in­di­ca­tion that Jack's sen­ti­ments about the be­hav­iour of the ca­bal are shared by the ma­jor­i­ty of the elec­torate?

The lead­ers of the PP must now be con­sid­er­ing how the pop­u­la­tion will re­act if pre­sent­ed with the same slate of "ca­bal min­is­ters" in the fu­ture. Lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tions are a few months away. Suc­cess and fail­ure for the PP will de­pend sig­nif­i­cant­ly on how the PM po­si­tions her cam­paign against a back­drop of an un­pop­u­lar ca­bal.

Dr Ram­c­hand Ram­per­sad

El So­cor­ro