#BTColumn – Essential Owen is essential reading

The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

by Adrian Sobers

“Prudence, and a calm review of the financial powers of a country, were the first objects of a Statesman.” – (Edmund Burke, Speech on Army Estimates, 1778)

In his discussion on the great Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind) says, “Society, Burke wrote in a celebrated line, is a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn. Mutilate the roots of society and tradition, and the result must inevitably be the isolation of a generation from its heritage, the isolation of individuals from their fellow men, and the creation of the sprawling, faceless masses.”

The selected speeches and statements of our former Prime Minister, The  Rt. Hon. Owen Arthur, published in The Essential Owen is not only essential reading, but doubles as an example of the aforementioned partnership Burke alluded to. The living can, and the unborn will eventually, benefit from reading and reflecting on these speeches. I have deliberately opened with Edmund Burke.

In his discussion on Burke as political economist, Gregory Collins writes, “Burke’s reflective attitude toward commerce and manufactures, reinforced by contemporary recognition of his economic literacy and the authority he commanded in Parliament, signals that his commentary on political economy should be studied with heightened seriousness.” The same can be said of the speeches and statements selected for The Essential Owen.

If Burke can be classed as a British statesman-thinker whose economic writings warrant study, then this collection confirms Mr. Arthur as Burke’s Barbadian statesman-thinker  counterpart. Collins makes the point that Burke’s principal economic writing, Thoughts and Details, is addressed to particular historical circumstances.

Similarly, in reading The Essential Owen, we do well to keep the context in which the speeches were delivered (especially the budgetary proposals).

Should you embark on this essential reading journey, it will become clear that we have much to be thankful for and have come a long way. Even clearer still, we have a much longer way to go. The collection ends on a note with which I begin in earnest. Mr. Arthur ended his final budget speech (2007) with a poem by H.A. Vaughn: “But whatsoe’er of ours you keep, Whatever fades or disappears, Above all else we send you this – The flaming faith of these first years.”

There is much to keep from “the flaming faith of these first years”, but there is also much that needs to change. In said speech, Mr. Arthur put it this way, “I have urged that we accelerate the programme to build a post-colonial economy that can function without depending on the old familiar trade and financial props which carried our economy through the immediate post Independence period.”

“I have consistently urged that the nature of the adjustment that is required to enable Barbados to function in the evolving global economy is too much for the society and the economy to accommodate in one fell swoop, and it has to be properly sequenced.”

The proper sequencing of removing these props must eventually be extended to the government itself. Failing that, we are setting ourselves up to be a byword among the nations.

Mr. Arthur’s call for a proper sequencing especially applies to our social security system.

In the conclusion of The Election Budget (22 October 2002), he said: “The consequences of the measures will be felt as far as the year 2060, for we have moved today [referring to the pension reforms presented] to ensure that children in pre-school enjoy the prospect of having their pensions guaranteed rather become the victims of a bankrupt National Insurance Scheme.”

In his lecture to the Young Economist Association of the UWI (25 February 2010), Mr. Arthur referenced The Barbados Model: “It is therefore important, at this critical juncture, that our economic and financial affairs are not ordered only to satisfy an accountant’s delights” […] Nor should our affairs be directed only towards the use of austerity as a policy, invoking what Errol Barrow in 1974 referred to as the ‘confraternity of pain and deprivation.’”

The fourth feature of this model spoke to the role of the State: “For Barbados to succeed, the Government must function like an entrepreneur. It must take responsible risks in search of higher returns in the form of sustained national development. It must engage in policy innovation, often in ways that contradicts orthodox precepts. It must, as circumstances warrant, make direct investments in the economy to lead the way for the private sector to follow.”

I end by returning to the poem from Mr. Arthur’s final budget speech: “When by dark doubts you are assailed [ . . .] Read what we won and where we failed”. It would be a gross understatement to say that we are at a critical juncture; and on several levels at that. I invite the reader to, well, read where this country has won and where we failed in this collection. As for the future, I propose that we turn to a most unlikely source. An essay from Salman Rushdie’s Languages of Truth.

“And when one lives at a hinge moment in history, as we do, as Shakespeare did when he wrote his protean plays, a moment when everything is in flux, everything is changing at immense speed, when the future is up for grabs and dark storm clouds rush across the sun, and when there are plagues [literally in our case] and dragons loose in the world [China anyone?], then it becomes essential to admit that the old forms will not do, the old ideas will not do.”

Sir Rushdie ends thus, “Because all must be remade, all, with our best efforts, must be rethought, reimagined, and rewritten, and to do otherwise would be to fail, most lamentably to fail, in the pursuit of our art.” Not only the pursuit of our art, but the pursuit of sound: education, economics, entrepreneurship, philosophy, science (not to be confused with scientism), and theology. We have our work cut out, but we are capable.

Adrian Sobers is a prolific letter writer and commentator on matters of social interest. This column was offered as a Letter to the Editor.