Editorial

Newsday

3 Hrs Ago

Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar. – File photo

“I HAVE never knowingly made a non-controversial speech in my life,” Margaret Thatcher famously said.

Kamla Persad-Bissessar looks hell-bent on following in the Iron Lady’s footsteps. But even Ms Thatcher would blush at our prime minister’s recent language.

On October 24, the UNC leader issued, without evidence, an extraordinary broadside against the country’s principal opposition party, saying, “The PNM’s main concern is the protection of the illegal profits of their drug mafia financiers.” Hours earlier, she described the hierarchy of the Law Association, the statutory body set up to protect and assist the public in legal matters, as “eat-a-food filth.”

Before all that, Mrs Persad-Bissessar responded to summary executions at sea by the Trump administration by calling on the US military to “kill them all violently,” and suggested traffickers should be “blown to pieces.” On concerns about the extrajudicial nature of the killings, the PM blurted, “People are saying no due process, no law – whatever.”

Not only is this rhetoric dangerous and undiplomatic, it is also incredibly unstatesmanlike. Individually, each incident might be excused as a reckless lapse. Collectively, they confirm a picture of a politician prone to utterances that do not befit public office.

Speaking with reporters on October 25, Mrs Persad-Bissessar attempted to tone down her language and apply a veneer of reason to inflammatory positions. But even in doing so, she once again demonstrated, troublingly, a cavalier attitude to facts, stating Dr Rowley – who last week joined a host of former Caricom leaders calling for the preservation of the Caribbean as a “zone of peace” – had been voted out of office.

He, in fact, stepped down.

Similarly, she continued to tell a story linking the totality of this country’s murders, a significant portion of which are crimes of passion and opportunity, such as robberies and home invasions, with narco-trafficking next door on the other side of the Gulf of Paria.

Dr Rowley was no Winston Churchill and made crass remarks.

But the difference between his conduct and Mrs Persad-Bissessar’s is that whereas his arguably originated in contempt, the current PM seeks to go further and to emulate the radical right.

Because the UNC was resoundingly voted into power in April, Mrs Persad-Bissessar may also feel she has a special mandate to unfetter her language. But her party’s victory rested on just 30 per cent of the electorate in one of the lowest voter turnouts ever.

The PM mistakes the first-past-the-post mirage supplied by a special majority in Parliament with broad social consensus, something she does not have in a country with a rich tradition of multiculturalism, harmony and pan-Caribbeanism. That makes her posturing even more alienating, both at home and abroad.