CHARLESTOWN, Nevis, 8th March 2011 - Hastings and I, and our families have been good friends for twenty years and will be for the next twenty if the good Lord gives us the time. A number of people, knowing of our friendship have asked me what I thought of his article ‘Republican Tea Party tee off in Nevis’. Some have taken offence. Some take it to be extravagantly racist. Some say that as a white friend whose column is often in the Press I should make my comment. Fine!
I am not going to defend or criticise point by point, but I do want to reassure those who share my pale complexion, that Hastings had no racist intent in his article. This is not just my opinion. It is a certainty.
Sometimes a different message may be received in the use of the very same words by two different writers. I remember an earlier article by Hastings in which he said ‘Little black boy, little black girl, get an education!’ The importance of doing well at school was his theme. A sentiment that I share. However, if I wrote those very same words, someone would tell me that I was being racist. That would not have been my intent. However, if I wrote ‘rich and white’ (I would leave out the ‘very’) of the Chrishi Beach set it would be treated, as it is, as descriptive. After all they are mostly rich and white in comparison to the average Nevisian.
Hastings uses colourful language and allusions to make his points. His style is convoluted and unclear and even I have difficulty in following all of it. Perhaps it is because I know that my good friend has not a racist bone in his body that I am not upset because I can see that he is trying to draw attention to an apparent alliance between a large group of ex patriates (with Nevisian citizenship?), Caucasians, rich persons who live in the Jones Estate area and the CCM Leadership. His claim is that these people are concerned about crime (aren’t we all?) and want Mark Brantley in power to handle it, but that their underlying aim is to get a better deal for themselves under a CCM government. CCM looking money to fight an election from these Jones estate people is the other side of the equation. How far this is actually so I cannot say, although I heard the Premier on the air sounding rather annoyed having heard that Amory and Brantley had held a meeting with a large group of white people at Chrishi Beach to discuss crime. Why, he said, did they not come to the Government rather than the Opposition? The Government was in a position to take action. The Opposition was not. Why did they not ask Yearwood, he is white and he lives in the area? Why did they not ask Gaskell? Is it black man Yearwood? Is it black man Gaskell? It is not therefore just Hastings who has his suspicions about the motives of the conveners. Although the article is colourfully/clumsily worded it is certain that it has a political point not a racist point to make, and that there is fact behind some of it.
I am aware that some who may have nothing to do with any of the participants initially have felt unhappy about the article. They don’t like the US Republican Tea Party. The Tea Party is not a bad analogy, nothing that should trouble anyone, for it is an extreme wing of the conservative movement that has wormed its way into the mainstream so that it has influence and heavy Press coverage, over and above its numerical representation. They don’t like the reference to the 18th Tee. Actually there is nothing in it. Brantley plays golf and the 18th Tee signifies that the game is coming to a close. And under ‘Fifth Columnist’, in the dictionary we read ‘the term has migrated in use over time and is now sometimes used more generally to mean traitor or spy’. Or refers to someone who appeared to be on one side but was in fact on the other, an enemy in your midst. In the political battle now joined, the above is unlikely to be the most disturbing description of those on the other side.
Anonymous blogs are never to be believed. Political activists may have put in some of their own following the article in order to attempt to discredit Hastings. Both of us are vilified without merit, and frequently by some in the CCM leadership. It would be good if crime was not politicised if that meant that the most effective policy against it then resulted. Crime and society’s response to it is often part of party political policy in many countries. In England, to get votes, policy on crime is set in neat little phrases such as Tony Blair’s ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.
Hastings critics now accuse him of politicising crime. Do these critics not listen to Brantley’s ‘On the Mark’ programme where he has been doing exactly that for a long time? ‘This Government is not interested in the issue of crime’, he says. What is the evidence for that? It cannot lie in the barracks and housing that this Government has built for our police force, nor in the increased number of police now in the Nevis Force. None of that happened during CCM’s time. The difficulty for anyone who wants to try to unite the island on the crime issue is that there is no trust whatever between the political parties. The Tea Party people, the Jones Bay white folk however they may be referred to, appear to have set out their stall for Mark Brantley and as such have no grounds for complaint when it is said that they are a political grouping with a political goal.
The CCM has not denied these meetings at Chrishi Beach, nor that they were for fund raising purposes. There is no law in Nevis, as far as I am aware, unlike the strict campaign funding rules in the USA, which prevents political parties seeking and receiving large sums of money. But sometimes where there is a ‘Quo’ there is also a ‘Quid’. It is then that those involved could find themselves in difficulties. Large scale funding of a Nevis political party by a group of ex-patriates, if it occurs, is a matter of public interest, and that I think was what Hastings was driving at. I regret the way in which he sought to give effect to his message, and the reaction to it, but it will not have any consequences, because there is no racist intent behind it. As to the Chrishi Beach people, let us get something positive out of all this: forget the Tea Party, join the Lunch Party! If there actually was a meeting of 300 or so with Amory and Brantley, that shows a wish to get (more) involved in the island in a particular manner. The best way to participate in our community is to play a role in the Nevis Food Revolution, the first stage of which is the School Meals Programme. This needs money, ideas, talent and time. Hasting and I and chef Mark Roberts would be pleased to be invited to talk to any group about it as we are the three private citizens trying our utmost to push this public private initiative forward. For further details see my next article ‘The Lunch Party’.
