Morris Cargill

AT THE start of World War I, Barbados sent an encouraging message to Britain saying, "carry on England! Barbados is behind you".

Instead of a nice message like that, Jamaica recently got a ticking off. The Prime Minister of Barbados, Mr. Owen Arthur, criticised the very expensive way in which we handled our financial crisis. Mr. Arthur is theoretically correct. But he has never had to deal in Barbados with a bunch of rascals and incompetents which the unfortunate Dr. Omar Davies had to confront in the '90s. Our boys had tangled up their affairs in such a clever way that to this day they have not all been disentangled. In that respect the only weapons our Omar had were attorney-generals and the hard-working and conscientious men and women on their staffs; pop-guns compared with the high-powered legal cannon of his opposition.

Incidentally in The Gleaner of Tuesday, September 7th Dr. Omar Davies is quoted as saying among other things that the Century depositors got back 100 per cent of their deposits with interest accrued from July 10th, 1996. A friend has told me that while he did indeed get his capital back he got no interest whatever. If this is true of my friend, it is certainly true of everybody else. I wonder whether Dr. Davies made the mistake or whether The Gleaner's report erred.

During the second World War in England MI-5 had a department popularly but not publicly known as the Nasty Accident Department. When certain dangerous people turned out to be beyond the grasp of the law, the Nasty Accident Department would contrive to have them run over by a bus. That sort of action was totally beyond the powers of Dr. Davies during the '90s. Jamaica, being a highly immoral country insists by way of compensation upon taking a strictly moral attitude to action of that sort, Mr. Arthur is quite correct to say that while we were bailing out our depositors we also spent a fortune bailing out a lot of top people who didn't deserve it. But barrages of high-powered and expensive lawyers have prevented Omar Davies from doing anything else. If Owen Arthur had to deal with that lot he would have lost a lot of weight.

Ex-communist confessions

During the present confessional exercises on the Breakfast Club Dr. Trevor Munroe made it perfectly clear that he had taken no direct part in the assassination of Maurice Bishop and others in Grenada some time ago. I believe Trevor Munroe, but surely he must realise that if you poke fire you cannot altogether escape the blame for starting a conflagration. In those days and for some time before Trevor Munroe had described himself as a Marxist-Leninist which is simply a long-winded way of saying Communist.

I have not known Trevor Munroe well but I have met him on and off for a long time. And he refused to take any part in the foolishness which Michael Manley called democratic socialism. He was far too honest a man to do so. But in spite of my liking for Trevor Munroe and for his ideological honesty, I always felt that he had been cast in the same mould as the inquisitors of the Spanish Inquisition. These inquisitors were not wicked people. When they had heretics burned at the stake, it was a well-intentioned effort to save their immortal souls from everlasting damnation. The same thing applied to the communists. They too were well-intentioned, though instead of burning people at the stake they preferred to 'liquidate' them to the greater glory of the gospel according to St Marx so that justice and happiness would reign.

Both inquisitors and communists were people who were just terribly stupid. In those days Trevor Munroe, although I think he liked me, would not have hesitated, I believe, to have liquidated me were I to have seriously stood in the way of Marxist liberation. But that's some time ago. Trevor Munroe has now become a highly respectable pillar of the establishment. I cannot help a bit of sardonic mirth at the thought that, comes the revolution (if it ever does come) Trevor Munroe will accordingly be amongst the first victims of the revolutionaries. But not I. I have never had the slightest intention of either taking part in a revolution or of being the victim of one. In such an event I shall either have died of old age or shall have evacuated myself to Grand Cayman like a dose of salts. Revolutions do nothing but make a bad situation worse.

Brief question

Up to a short time ago Phillip Paulwell was our off-white knight in shining armour in a successful joust or two against Cable and Wireless. But all of a sudden he has lapsed into silence. Has he been unhorsed?