Carl Schmitt, one of the fore­most Ger­man in­tel­lec­tu­al right-wing thinkers, ar­gued that the in­tel­lec­tu­al foun­da­tion of Par­lia­ment lies not in their rep­re­sen­ta­tive na­ture but their com­mit­ment to “a process of con­fronta­tion of dif­fer­ences and opin­ions” out of which a po­lit­i­cal will is es­tab­lished.

He de­fined Par­lia­men­tary de­bate as “an ex­change of opin­ion that is gov­erned by the pur­pose of per­suad­ing one’s op­po­nent through ar­gu­ment of the truth or jus­tice of some­thing, or al­low­ing one­self to be per­suad­ed of some­thing as true and just.”

For him, Par­lia­men­tary de­ci­sions should be made on the ba­sis of a clash of opin­ions rather than of in­ter­ests, and de­bate re­quires “in­de­pen­dence from par­ty ties and free­dom from self­ish in­ter­est; pub­lic de­bate and pub­lic dis­cus­sion, par­ley.”

He ar­gued that mass democ­ra­cy par­ties rep­re­sent eco­nom­ic and so­cial in­ter­ests, and win as­sent for their au­thor­i­ty through pro­pa­gan­da and ap­peals to the pas­sions.

“Par­lia­ment thus no longer has an in­tel­lec­tu­al foun­da­tion or mean­ing. Pop­u­lar rep­re­sen­ta­tion has up­set the bal­ance of pow­er and de­bates are now a façade. All pub­lic busi­ness has be­come an ob­ject of spoils and com­pro­mise,” he ar­gued.

For Schmitt, Par­lia­ment is “like a su­per­flu­ous dec­o­ra­tion, use­less and even em­bar­rass­ing as though some­one had paint­ed the ra­di­a­tor of a mod­ern cen­tral heat­ing sys­tem with red flames in or­der to give the ap­pear­ance of a blaz­ing fire.”

While I do not share most of Schmitt’s views, he would have been proud when he looked at what hap­pened in the T&T Par­lia­ment and what passed as a Bud­get de­bate. Schmitt would not have had to con­vince many that in this case his views have been proven cor­rect.

It is a dis­grace that the Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) failed to do its du­ty as the loy­al op­po­si­tion and ques­tion, chal­lenge, of­fer al­ter­na­tive views and im­por­tant­ly raise the con­cerns of the thou­sands of peo­ple who vot­ed for them in the elec­tions, held a mere year ago.

The fail­ure of al­most half the UNC MPs to speak in the Low­er House on an im­por­tant de­bate like the Bud­get is a dere­lic­tion of du­ty and the par­ty’s re­liance on the me­dia to do its job is un­be­com­ing.

Join­ing il­le­gal protests to burn tyres dur­ing a pan­dem­ic does no one any good, and is a weak at­tempt to save face.

As for the gov­ern­ment which con­trols the spend­ing and has pro­posed to in­crease the size of the Bud­get by $3 bil­lion there­by ef­fec­tive­ly spend­ing every cent it an­tic­i­pates to get from the en­er­gy wind­fall in the next 12 months, is equal­ly dis­grace­ful.

To think that the Bud­get has been in­creased by $3 bil­lion and the gov­ern­ment is spend­ing every cent it is ex­pect­ing to get from the in­creased en­er­gy sec­tor rev­enue and there is not a word from the Op­po­si­tion UNC, nor an ex­pla­na­tion from the gov­ern­ment why it needs to spend the ad­di­tion­al rev­enue in its en­tire­ty.

In what passed for the Bud­get de­bate in the Low­er House there was not an ex­pla­na­tion of why $52 bil­lion, and whether that is a one-off in­crease in ex­pen­di­ture, or if it is be­ing done to fa­cil­i­tate a stim­u­lus in the econ­o­my?

We had no de­bate on if this is a re­turn to high­er lev­els of spend­ing, if the strat­e­gy of re­duc­ing gov­ern­ment spend is now out of the win­dow, if this is the re­al cost of run­ning the coun­try and was be­ing masked in the past by the gov­ern­ment tak­ing an un­of­fi­cial loan from the pri­vate sec­tor by not pay­ing VAT re­funds in a time­ly fash­ion or its bills be­ing car­ried for­ward?

If there is no de­bate how do we get an­swers to these ques­tions?

We are in the mid­dle of a pan­dem­ic but the Min­is­ter of Health does not tell us how he plans to spend the bil­lions he has been al­lo­cat­ed. We do not hear of a plan of how we can look at to­tal spend in the Health sec­tor which we learn from to­day’s Busi­ness Guardian is ac­tu­al­ly clos­er to $12 bil­lion an­nu­al­ly.

We are spend­ing close to twice what is the av­er­age spend in the re­gion in health­care and most peo­ple will ad­mit they are not sat­is­fied with the qual­i­ty of health­care. You ei­ther feel that the pub­lic health­care sys­tem is like­ly to fail you or you feel that you are be­ing made to pay through your nose in the pri­vate health­care sys­tem.

The Bud­get de­bate should have start­ed to ad­dress the plans for health­care, how can we as a so­ci­ety en­sure we get val­ue for mon­ey. Is the gov­ern­ment fool­ing it­self with this health sur­charge and should we not move to a health­care sys­tem that in­sists on health in­sur­ance ei­ther in the pri­vate sec­tor or util­is­ing a pri­vate, pub­lic part­ner­ship, not in the sense of the PPP but in a hy­brid ap­proach that en­sures the gov­ern­ment picks up in­sur­ance for those who can least af­ford or those on gov­ern­ment pen­sion.

We must dis­cuss whether in bud­get­ing for the health sec­tor the present sys­tem where con­sul­tants are hard­ly ever at the hos­pi­tals as are reg­is­trars and the bur­den of the health­care sys­tem re­sides on the House Of­fi­cers and In­terns who are op­er­at­ing with lim­it­ed su­per­vi­sion is what we as­pire to. We know it to be true and we know it leads to un­ac­cept­able out­comes and we know we should be get­ting bet­ter val­ue for mon­ey but we choose to leave it alone be­cause the med­ical lob­by is so pow­er­ful.

Why did we not hear from the Min­is­ter of Health or the Op­po­si­tion on whether in spend­ing $6 bil­lion the con­stant prob­lems of di­ag­nos­tic equip­ment break­ing down or hours of wait for a bed when you are at your most vul­ner­a­ble or the doc­tors who seem to give their best in their pri­vate of­fices rather than at the hos­pi­tal and in some un­seem­ly cas­es try to push their pa­tients to­wards their pri­vate prac­tice? Would this be ad­dressed?

What of your con­stituents? At least the peo­ple of Ma­yaro could say they heard from their MP, I live in Diego Mar­tin West and my MP who hap­pens to be Prime Min­is­ter was silent. He nev­er told us how this Bud­get will make the lives of his con­stituents bet­ter, how will we utilise Ch­aguara­mas to build out tourism? How will he lift some of the peo­ple of Care­nage out of pover­ty?

The fail­ure of the Bud­get de­bate is an­oth­er ex­am­ple of the fail­ure of lead­er­ship.