The Constitution of Barbados is a two-edged sword.
It seeks to protect the public from the politicians and at the same time it fails to illuminate the fact that there is also another constitution which I call the fiscal constitution.
As an example, the Constitution speaks of the Estimates but it does not speak of a Budget. Neither, for that matter, does it say anything about the role of the Central Bank of Barbados and its governor, even though such governors have an enormous influence in the governance of the financial affairs of this country.
Let us deal with the Budget first. A private member’s resolution taking note of the Budget was laid in the Senate by Democratic Labour Party (DLP) Senator Verla DePeiza and debated last week.
I found this development to be constitutionally curious, but another expert of more muscular and direct language might call it constitutionally offensive, and claim ten points for accuracy; since debates on money and the raising of money are not matters for the Senate. They are exclusively the domain of the House of Assembly.
I would not have thought that this resolution could reach the Order Paper, but then my expertise in these matters is limited to reading and researching on such esoteric issues for decades, buttressed by a five-year stint as deputy speaker in one of the most highly charged and powerful lower houses of Parliament.
Debating a budget in the Senate offends against the historical undergirdings of our constitutional heritage. The people, those who were not of the landed gentry – the commoners – only got democracy and their say and their own house through the need of the king to “raise money” for national purposes. They came in time to claim the exclusive right to discuss money matters, and neither the House of Lords nor our Senate can now abrogate or water down that right.
Indeed, at Estimates time, the Lower House calls on the Government to redress the people’s grievances before passing any Head of the Estimates. The power to raise money is the only control which the Parliament has on the Cabinet, because whether or not the Cabinet controls the Lower House, the ministers must go to the House to secure passage of any money resolution.
That is part of the fiscal constitution, and its fingerprints are all over the formal Constitution which we subscribed to in 1966.
This past week too, the role and influence of the governor of the Bank of England and the Governor of our own Central Bank here at home were high in the news. The scandal of the “massaging and manipulation” of the LIBOR rate caused some focus on Barclays Bank and the British central bank.
Barclays was heavily fined, and I intend to use that imbroglio for a more technical article on the law as it relates to the formal and moral regulation of commercial banks, a subject which excites my intellectual juices as much as the ringing of the bell caused Pavlov’s dog to salivate.
Let us take another peek at the fiscal constitution of our fair land.
Sir Courtney Blackman, a former Governor of the Central Bank once declared, when pressed to comment on a matter of policy, that he was a “creature of the Minister of Finance”.
His statement was a classic truth spoken by a man of great understanding of the nuances of the fiscal constitution of our island. Policy was for the politicians to declare, and advice was what the technocrats offered.
Some neophytes who did not understand, attacked him; but it was clear to me that he was drawing a line of distinction between being a technocrat who offered advice and being a minister who was free to accept or reject advice from any quarter, including by implication, a corner so enlightened as that of a governor of the Central Bank.
Whatever Dr DeLisle Worrell meant when he said there was no alternative policy but that being pursued by the Government, this is not the place to analyze the implications of his comment, but it sounded to me as his comment had the pants and shirt of a policy statement, and one wonders whether it offended the spirit of the fiscal constitution.
It may surely invite, I am sure unintended, a scrutiny of the Government’s policy contrasted with all the other economic policies, on or off the table.
In the run up to the silly season of electioneering, such a declaration seems to me to be unusually adversarial, and it will surely capture, for later or for more immediate response, the ears of those who see red when such statements are made, even if they are not blue vex!
• Ezra Alleyne is an attorney at law and former Deputy Speaker of the House of Assembly.
