There are some striking similarities between cricket and life in general. Some commentators take the view that playing the game is good for building youngsters’ character since they learn life skills by observing the nuances and rules of the game as they play.
It is these wider observances that prompted C.L.R. James to write his classic disquisition on the game, Beyond The Boundary, and of the emancipating nectar milked from the game by black men, descendants of the slaves as captives to colonialism playing and conquering their white counterparts, the descendants of the former masters.
So cricket is about life and it is about politics. Yet it is about more than that, for in its political and sociological context, being master was an important political status. That it must have been so, we need only go back to the very first Labour government in Britain in 1948 when Lord Shawcross stood in his place at the dispatch box while making a speech and answered the Conservative opposition with the wounding retort that after all the talk, “we are the Masters now”.
So make no mistake about it, when we ruled the world at cricket, we were making the most profound sociopolitical statement of all time. A people had come of age, and what could not be done directly could always be done indirectly.
Have you ever wondered why a cricket Test match is scheduled to last five days and the usual political cycle of the Westminster system is scheduled to last for five years? Of course they may both come to an end within that time frame, but five years is the norm. Can that be mere coincidence, or did the British founding fathers know something we didn’t? One wonders.
I find it interesting that the Americans never took up cricket as a national or regional pastime. Nor have they adopted the five-year period in any of their sporting regimes. They have two-, four- and six-year periods, but never five. The House of Representatives is elected every two years, the president every four, and senators every six years.
And that brings us to the election politics in the United States this year. Obama finds himself captured by the fragmented nature of power in that political system. Unlike Freundel Stuart who in theory and practice commands or ought to command the support of the entire Cabinet and Parliament, the president may control the cabinet but he has no control of any kind over members of the House or Senate. So he finds it challenging to get a stimulus package and a health care law.
But if the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) had wanted a stimulus package for the economy, the Prime Minister would only have to say the word and the DLP majority would ensure its passage.
One of the major concerns that I have is with the fragmentary nature of political power in the United States and I am amazed that they manage to get anything legislative done, given the political landscape of that country.
We need therefore to consider our good fortune. The fragmentary nature of the Greek political landscape allows for the splintering of policy to the detriment of the country, but when this country was challenged in 1991, the Sandiford Government of the day was able to use its majority control of the Lower House to implement savage but what they argued were life-saving measures to save the economy.
It is different in Greece, and in the United States too, and it is all the more reason why we need to ensure that the correct policies are adopted by the Government of the day.
Whatever else may be going on anywhere, our constitutional system here, unlike that in some other places, allows the Government to do what it thinks is necessary in the public interest to get the economy to grow. It does not need the support of the Opposition. It simply requires the right policies to get the job done.
Obama may have problems connected with the embedded structures of Washington’s constitutional system, and Greek election laws may not serve the Greeks as well as our system serves us.
We are fortunate. Both in sport and in politics we have inherited an honourable legacy. All we need to do is to use that legacy for the national benefit.
