The word democracy is being bandied about quite a bit these days. It’s one of the buzzwords of the newly-found leader of the opposition. Democracy is under threat, he claims. Of course, he doesn’t go on to cite examples of how this is so. His style is to drop baseless allegations and leave them to innuendo. Let people get the feeling that something is amiss. Then there are some people who spout the word democracy with reference to the capture of all the parliamentary seats by one party. There’s this pervasive notion that a one-party government is equivalent to a one-party state, which in the minds of many people is an undemocratic state. Quite wrong. Quite wrong. We are misunderstanding the meaning of the word democracy. A simple definition is government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them through a system of representation involving free elections. So, in a democracy, power resides with the people who, from time to time, choose governments in free and fair elections. Any reference there to the representation of parties in Parliament? No, because democracy has nothing to do with how many parties are in Parliament. In fact, it is possible to have democracy with ten parties in Parliament or one party. What better example of the latter can you have than the previous Parliament of Barbados and the earlier part of the present one. The people of Barbados in whom supreme power is vested exercise their democratic right in free and fair elections to give the Barbados Labour Party all the seats. That did not make Barbados an undemocratic one-party state as some seem to think. A one-party state is a state with with a constitution that makes provision for only one political party. Examples of such are North Korea, China and Cuba. So even when we didn’t have a parliamentary opposition, Barbados was as democratic as any other country. The people of Barbados were able to vote in a by-election and a general election. But what about the civil rights and liberties that are associated with democracy, you might ask. Well, the truth is that there is no automatic link between democracy and civil liberties. Grenada, under Eric Geary, was a democracy where freedom of expression by political opponents and the press was met with harassment and violence from his notorious mongoose gang. A similar thing happened in Guyana on the Forbes Burnham, though some might question whether Guyana was really a democracy at that time. And all of these infringements of civil liberties occurred with parliamentary oppositions. The presence of an opposition didn’t prevent them from happening. Let’s go back to the example of Barbados for the opposite view. With no opposition in Parliament, Did we have any infringement of civil rights and liberties? Were opponents of the government persecuted or victimized? No. On the contrary, we had a level of people involvement and tolerance that is unprecedented in our history. The government seeks the views of citizens before changes are made to important aspects of our social life through town hall meetings. It consults people through parish meetings to find out their concerns. It sends contentious legislation to select committees of Parliament and complies with some of the suggestions recommended. It holds press briefings after Cabinet meetings to inform the nation of important decisions coming out of the Executive. My friend, does that sound to you like an undemocratic one-party state?
Barbados has a strong tradition of civil rights and liberties. Those rights are guaranteed to remain with or without an opposition in Parliament. And democracy, government elected by the people in free and fair elections, is part of that tradition.
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