Leader of the Opposition Owen Arthur has gone from promising to give back all allowances to privatizing almost everything Government owns. It looks as if the whole public sector will be on the chopping block. Nothing is off the table – education, health, housing, transport, communications, social services – the works! – Douglas Leopold Phillips, a pseudonym for the Democratic Labour Party, November 23.
We are now on the brink and if this continues, Barbados will be on the slippery slope of devaluation and all that this state entails. Government must pull us back from the brink. – Leader of the Opposition Owen Arthur, October 13.
THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICS is as important as the facts and the figures employed in the discourse.
The recent attempt by the ruling Democratic Labour Party (DLP) to address Government’s lack of money by suggesting that the Opposition was planning to send home 10 000 public sector workers is an example of framing, which is the use of “mental structures that shape the way we see the world”.
Not many people would disagree that the pending general election ought to be a battle between these two labour parties for the right to govern this country. In a non-political world, that battle would be engaged on competing policies and programmes.
Unfortunately, the people’s actions are influenced by their goals and their plans, which in turn can be influenced by the language of politics.
In this regard, the language must be believable, even when it is designed to convey a frame, for example, of fear.
Having itself proposed to privatize some of the statutory boards in Barbados as far back as 1992, when the late David Thompson was the Minister of State in the Ministry of Finance, the DLP seems eager in more recent times to avoid using the word privatization. And that is understandable because it evokes fear in the minds of public servants employed at the statutory boards.
In an apparent effort to engage the Government in a public discourse, the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) identified with Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler’s call for engagement. This followed on a short-lived crusade by the minister on the public sector job cuts allegation.
He had suggested that four Opposition members met at the University of the West Indies (UWI) and reached specific conclusions in their deliberations on the public sector.
Not surprisingly, Sinckler himself was unable to call out the Opposition, but the never shy Minister of Agriculture Dr David Estwick pounced on the Opposition’s comments on privatization. And the concept of framing allowed a mental structure to paint a picture connecting the public sector job cuts charge with privatization.
According to George Lakoff, professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, who developed the concept of framing: “You can’t see or hear frames. They are part of what cognitive scientists call the ‘cognitive unconscious’ – structures in our brains that we cannot consciously access, but know by their consequences: the way we reason and what counts as common sense.”
It is long believed that the consequences of privatization are job losses and private ownership. There are several ways in which private people can become involved in the ownership of public assets, but understanding those ways requires reasoning. The latter is not always done with reference to common sense and so there is tremendous scope in politics for exploiting the voter’s mindset through framing.
Can easily backfire
The practice of framing is scientific and the strength of framing evolves out of a system of values and beliefs. Therefore, its ad hoc use can easily backfire on its users. In this case, when Prime Minister Freundel Stuart joined the framing and contradicted Sinckler’s position on the Transport Board and the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), he opened a door.
If there is one thing more our politicians have to learn is that the message must be consistent and constantly repeated by the believers to be effective.
Further, when Sinckler suggested that there was no philosophical difference on privatization between the BLP and the DLP, the seemingly unplanned strategy of the latter was fully exposed.
The strategy revealed an emerging politics of fear by the ruling party.
This revelation was further reinforced when the issue of devaluation returned to the public arena via the lips of Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister, Senator Darcy Boyce, who reminded the Senate on November 14 that he and others in the private sector and the labour movement had worked together in the early 1990s to make sure devaluation was off the cards.
“It is not on the cards now, and it is not on the cards for Barbados,” Boyce declared.
He said Barbados had 15 weeks’ cover of foreign reserves – in excess of the 12 weeks that was acceptable.
“You bring the IMF [International Monetary Fund] in when your reserves are gone,” Boyce said. “So I don’t think we have any date in the future with the IMF.”
Still, we should be grateful for this timely reminder from Sir Courtney Blackman, a former Governor of the Central Bank, who wrote: “Through the bank’s annual and quarterly reports, regular Press briefings, speeches by the governor, and senior economists, etc., the Barbadian public has been transformed into the Caribbean’s most literate society in terms of economic affairs. It was undoubtedly the public understanding of the relationship between wages and the exchange rate which helped the Sandiford Administration to avert the devaluation of the Barbados dollar in the economic crisis of 1991-92.”
Like privatization, the notion of devaluation creates images of continuous decline in the standard of living for the citizens of the country whose currency is devalued.
Minister Boyce’s reference to devaluation, therefore, seemed to be inspired by the Opposition’s proposal to increase the spending power of Barbadians. Immediately, the Government tried to counter the proposal by the use of a frame, which suggests that the country’s foreign reserves would be under threat. And it is that threat that raises the spectre of devaluation.
Against the backdrop of these manoeuvrings and posturings, the political stage is undoubtedly set for genuine policy debates on the issues which have to be resolved if the Barbados economy is to regain momentum and the society is able to provide for the most vulnerable.
But I would suggest that the DLP’s discomfort with its weak performance may see the employment of even more framing rather than any serious inclination to debate the country’s future.
Only last week, political scientist Dr Tennyson Joseph suggested that “. . . the BLP must use the moment to engage in a genuine policy debate”. His suggestion followed from the attacks on the BLP’s promise to “put money back into people’s pockets”.
It must be noted, however, that not one politician opposed the BLP’s promise. Why? It is a difficult frame to attack in an economic environment in which the public has been deprived for the last four years.
Unfortunately for the country as a whole, it does not appear to be in the interest of the Government to want a genuine debate on any policy if the politics of fear is an option.
• Albert Brandford is an independent political correspondent. Email [email protected]
