The new year has broken in a manner which is bound to force the society to ask many questions of itself and the political directorate and to wonder about the direction in which our country is heading.
Indeed one senior journalist writing in another section of the Press has called for the dismissal of the Minister of Finance and the takeover of that Ministry by the Prime Minister himself.
Whether that advice is taken it is now clear that we shall have to reassess the relative importance to this country’s national well-being of the promotion of the “society” as distinct from building the economy.
That much is clear since high among the proposals of the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW) has been suggestions for the removal or cutting back of some of the very programmes that were touted as examples of the promotion of the society. Programmes designed to aid the promotion of the society cannot stand on their own, but are dependent on the strength and integrity of the economy.
Faced with a primitive economy, Mr Errol Barrow, our first prime minister, drew on his expertise to build this society by the enactment of free secondary education and free tertiary level education. He used deficit financing to assist him to pay for these programmes, but he always struck a balance between the strength of the economy and the needs of the society.
As a result he never had to cut anyone’s salary or to make outlandish promises which were nothing more than pie in the sky to win the people’s favour. The Owen Arthur administrations also paid careful attention to the necessary balancing act between the demands of the society and the needs of the economy.
We fear that this was not done and a crucial part of this debate will have to be, a clear recognition that deficit financing is a sharp two-edged tool which can cut both ways. Properly managed and controlled it can be as useful as a fire. Uncontrolled, it threatens to burn the entire economy.
In the interest of orderly managed societies, recession or no recession, our Ministers of Finance must pay attention to those fundamental first principles laid down and followed by Mr Barrow. To ignore his opinions on unbridled deficit financing is to court disaster.
We shall also have to consider how the unions are seen in this society. They are the workers’ representatives; the Congress of Trade Unions and Staff Associations of Barbados (CTUSAB) head Cedric Murrell described the announcement of the lay-offs as a breach of the Social Partnership protocol.
That was highly undesirable but even that unintended snub may have been the result of events crushing in on the Government.
But nothing should prevent the unions from confronting the situation with the objective of doing the best that they can for the amelioration of the plight of their members.
One lesson to be learnt from this aspect of the matter is that balancing the respective claims of the society and the economy is no easy task, but the workers’ interests are a critical part of the process.
Consultation with the workers must therefore take place before and not after adjustments of their rights are considered as part of any solution to problems of the economy.
The other lesson of course is that modern societies cannot survive if they are built on unsure economic foundations. When that happens, the centre cannot hold and things fall apart.