#BTColumn – Resignation letter

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.

by Dr Derek Alleyne

Following relentless calls for the resignation or termination of the employment tenure of the former Attorney General, Adriel Brathwaite, for what the current AG Dale Marshall argued was a disregard for the safety of Barbadians, people have been calling, with justification, for the axing of Mr Marshall as the level of violent crimes continues to increase.

I have argued that with Kerry Symmonds, George Payne and Ralph Thorne almost certain not to receive the confidence of MAM as Attorney General, the other options within the elected members of the House being Abrahams and Hinkson, Marshall has held on to his job by default.

However, the recent disclosure by Marshall that he saw a confidential letter addressed to the Governor General would have placed any other PM in a tangle.

Unless Mr Marshall was advising Ms Moore (a General Secretary of the largest trade union in Barbados) how to write the letter, then his statement, at best, is regrettable and at worst, unworthy of the holder of the chief legal adviser to the Government.

I checked the Collins dictionary for the meaning of “confidential” and it explained “spoken, written or given in confidence; secret, private; suggestive of or denoting intimacy”.

Marshall had no right being privy to a confidential letter written to the Governor General unless Ms Moore cannot write a letter, or he was her legal adviser in which he ought not to have disclosed the existence of the letter unless Moore was unable to do so.

That she spoke at the meeting created doubt in my mind about the letter writing episode. If the letter made the resignation from the senate effective on October 1st, why could Moore not have told Barbadians that she had written to the Governor General and offered a resignation?

What compounds the matter, in my view, is that the learned AG told Barbadians that he would read the letter if the Governor General gave him permission so to do. He has disclosed that the letter is confidential and that the resignation took effect on October 1st 2020. Something is not right at all!

Any other Prime Minister would have been checking the Constitution to see if it is possible to invite Senator Taitt and promote her to the post of Attorney General. But we should not expect Ms Mottley to be so concerned with procedural niceties, norms or values.

Ms Mottley has set her bar at the base. How else could Indar Weir be still serving as Minister of Agriculture in the face of the charges levelled by a former campaign manager in 2018 and minister in a BLP Government? How else could he be still facing her every cabinet meeting if the charges levelled by Anthony Wood are true? Are we to believe that Wood is lying?

This spectacle at last Sunday’s meeting is yet another example of a Government elected on the argued bad performance of the outgoing without any consideration about skills, experience, capacity or knowledge of anything by the incoming.

Out of the cabinet for whatever they were worth are the most experienced (outside of Toppin and no one knows what he does) members of the MAM administration, Prescod, Clarke and Payne. That is not by error, but is seemingly designed to give unquestionable power to MAM.

In the process, every standard, procedure, value and norm has been thrown into the wind in the words of the Minister of Education as “archaic”. But Barbados sails on. Where we are heading seems as though no one knows.

Dr Derek Alleyne is a trade unionist, social commentator and member of the Democratic Labour Party.