Crabs in a Barrel

 

Anguillians share a unique version of the crabs in a barrel syndrome.  They raise up their leaders only to drag them down.  We did it to the Father of the Nation, the late Ronald Webster.  Now we are doing it to Dr Lorenzo Webster.

I know that Dr Webster is well able to defend himself from unfair criticism.  Years spent in public life in the USA has well equipped him to take all the heat that the kitchen can throw at him.  Still, here are my two cents for what it is worth.

Dr Ellis Lorenzo Webster is Anguilla’s current Premier.  He won his seat in 2020 at his second attempt in national politics.  One of Dr Webster’s characteristics is his humility.  The man appears to have no vanity about him.  He seems completely lacking in any signs of inadequacy.  He shows no chip on his shoulder.  There is nothing vainglorious or bombastic about him.  When he greets you, his smile is genuine.  He puts his hands together, and gently bows no matter how apparently lowly the status of the person.  He greets everyone the same way, high or low.  Unlike his denigrators, he suffers from no inferiority complex.  He does not need to prove his superiority, like some of his ethically and morally challenged opponents feel compelled to do.

Dr Webster was an island scholar, winning a government scholarship to study dentistry in the States.  Later, he attended Yale University in the US, where he obtained a Master’s degree, graduating in 1991 as a medical doctor.  While maintaining a busy and successful practice, he provided ear, nose and throat care for indigent patients in Florida where he had settled down.  In the States he was well known for participating in mentoring programs for elementary and high school students.  He led the society for minority physicians in Palm Beach County.  He chaired surgical sections at different hospitals.  He became involved in local, state, and national political campaigns in the USA.  It was hardly surprising that after some 20 years away his eyes turned to the political situation in his home island of Anguilla.

Before Dr Webster returned to Anguilla to take up the mantle of leadership, the island was run by a series of political groups entirely lacking in integrity.  Nepotism, cronyism, conflicts of interest, all ran rife decade after decade.  The voters shuffled from party to party, desperately hoping for an improvement every five years.  It never came.

Seven years ago, Dr Webster was unsuccessful in his political campaign to represent his village constituency of Island Harbour.  But he had proven his integrity and commitment.  When he ran again two years ago, he was returned to the House of Assembly by a landslide.  Since then, as leader of the political party with the most seats in the Assembly, he has taken up the mantle of Premier of the Island.

These past two years have seen him exhaust all of his political capital.  He is now daily criticized on the private radio stations by loud mouths who are all his intellectual and moral inferiors.  It is painful to listen.  I won’t repeat any of the egregious and undeserved insults that are showered on him on a daily basis.  I only note that he has not once deigned to respond in kind.  Amazingly, he continues to be the same gentle, courteous, almost diffident, person.  One never hears an unkind or insulting word from him.

Members of the political opposition are mainly silent.  It is not the opposition party that does most of the attacking on his character, integrity, and intelligence.  The most virulent attacks come from disappointed, previous members of his party.  They each claim to have been turned down on some interest or the other of theirs that they unsuccessfully promoted.  Hurt an Anguillian in his financial interests, and you have an enemy for life.

The political opposition do not have to be loud in their condemnation.  They are politically astute enough to know they need only keep quiet and let the governing party tear themselves apart.  Previous members of the party will do their work for them.  Their strategy is in three years’ time to swoop in and snatch up the prize of political power.  Their hope is that if they are successful, Dr Webster will then retreat to his medical practice in Palm Beach, leaving Anguilla to the scavengers.

 

The AUF GST

 

I occasionally tune in to Klass FM for entertainment when I am driving my car from North Hill into town.  I don’t get to hear much during the short drive.  But it seems these days I mostly hear some agitator or the other spouting propaganda and drumming up anti-government sentiment, usually over the impending arrival of GST.

These radio commentators assure us that Hurricane GST will hit Anguilla on 1 July because Premier Dr Lorenzo Webster betrayed Anguillians and agreed to implement GST when during the election campaign he promised if elected to do away with the AUF’s proposed GST (the Anguilla United Front was Anguilla’s previous administration).

It was not high sea-surface temperature that caused Hurricane GST to develop.  It was the AUF administration’s signature back in 2018 to the agreement to impose GST that set off the disaster.  The present Anguilla Progressive Movement administration, appointed on 30 June 2020, is taking the blame for it.  Do they deserve the abuse they are getting on social media and the talk show programmes?

I had a word with Mr Ivan Connor, the government’s press officer.  He explained to me that it was pure propaganda.

According to the draft AUF White Paper of May 2020, GST was going to be the best thing that ever happened to Anguilla.  It would help to restore growth and achieve fiscal sustainability and poverty alleviation.  It would enable our economy to respond to and recover from the global and economic recession, the pandemic, and natural disasters.  The AUF administration committed Anguilla to the full implementation of GST effective 1 January 2023.  (The White Paper was later revised by the APM administration and the FCDO and published in March 2021.)

The propaganda was that GST would not be an additional tax.  It would replace the tourist-paid Accommodation Tax, the miniscule Environmental Levy, and the almost non-existent Communication Levy.  The claim was that this would allow GST to be introduced at a relatively low rate.

The more outrageous claim was that GST would facilitate investment, provide incentives to exporters, and make Anguilla internationally competitive.  What spin-doctor dreamed this stuff up?  Mind you, a lot of this puffery is repeated in the subsequent APM revised White Paper.  Meanwhile, we know that the sole purpose of GST is to allow the Anguilla administration to get money to continue pampering the Anguillian unemployed and unemployable.

The AUF administration’s concession to the British Government in introducing GST arose from the devastation caused by Hurricane Irma in September 2017.  The AUF administration was in a dilemma.  It was faced with a choice.  Either enforce existing tax legislation (for example, the Chief Auditor’s Report consistently over the years shows that only 40% of Anguillians pay their property tax), or introduce a new tax, preferably GST.  The AUF administration chose the second option.  In agreeing to the Medium Term Economic and Fiscal Plan (MTEFP) in June 2018, the AUF promised the FCDO they would introduce GST in Anguilla.  They preferred to impose a new tax.  If we collected the outstanding unpaid taxes, we would probably have enough money to run the government for five years without GST.  We won’t enforce this one either.  Remember the rule:  we cannot turn “innocent” Anguillians into convicted criminals.  To this day, we still have not prosecuted, so far as I know, a single Property Tax evader.

Let us not forget how GST came upon us.  To recap, after Hurricane Irma in September 2017, we fell back on British taxpayers’ generosity to meet the over-indulgencies of our excessively expensive public service (I estimate we currently employ two to do the job of one).  When the hurricane passed, the British made a gift to the AUF administration of £60 million (EC$240 million at a four to one exchange rate) for rebuilding.

We had no reserves to pay for our structural repairs ourselves.  This grant was earmarked for capital infrastructure.  In return, the AUF administration promised that we would cease to rely on the British taxpayer.  In future we would raise our own revenue to pay our own costs.  We promised we would enact the GST Act.  As the months and years of the AUF administration passed, we did not do so.

In the middle of the 2020 pandemic, and the close down of Anguilla’s economy, the AUF administration begged for and got a further EC$100 million in grant in aid.  This was intended specifically to pay civil servants for the following ten months.  It was also, we realised, intended to throw money around to help win the coming general elections.  In exchange, the AUF administration promised again on 11 June 2020 that it would either enact the GST or cut the cost of the public service.  We took the money.  We did not cut the cost of the public service.  The AUF’s tactic did not work.  It lost the elections.  But not before it had negotiated yet another EC$100 million gift from the British taxpayers to pay civil servants.  This windfall was due to be paid within days after the general elections.

The day after coming to office on 30 June 2020, Dr Webster was faced with a dilemma.  There were no funds in the Treasury.  He must either default in paying civil servants’ salaries for June or accept the AUF-negotiated EC$100 million from the FCDO.  He chose to pay the civil servants.  You may think, as I do, that he missed the golden opportunity to send all of them home while he worked out how to permanently let half of them go as being an unproductive and unnecessary burden on Anguilla’s taxpayers.

Let us be clear.  We got the second EC$100 million by repeating the promise of the previous administration, that we would introduce GST.  Since we would not reduce our expenses of government, we would increase taxes to pay for it.  That was the promise.  On 29 July 2021, our House of Assembly passed the GST Act into force.

The new APM Administration was immediately in political trouble.  They promised the people during the 2021 election campaign that they would not agree to accept the British EC$100 million gift if it meant passing the GST Act.  But, once in office, they faltered.  They reconsidered.  They took the seemingly easy option of taking the money and agreeing in exchange to pass the GST Act into law.

The CDB had also agreed with the previous administration to make a $30 million loan conditional on passage of the GST Act.  The new administration needed this additional money to pay more salaries.  It could not turn it down. On taking the loan, it was now obligated also to the CDB to pass the GST Act into law

The FCDO did not force us to pass the GST Act.  We took their money, and the money of the CDB, on a solemn undertaking to start paying for our expensive government ourselves by imposing GST.  If we do not live up to our promises made in exchange for hard cash, then would we be anything but a bandit state?

We have no one to blame for our dire circumstances but ourselves.  The British don’t owe us anything.  We don’t pay a penny in British taxes.  Blaming the “British” for our present problems is pure xenophobia if not an appeal to racism.  Let us face it, we Anguillians always delight in blaming others for our misfortunes.  We are never to blame.  It has always been so.

What really gets to me is the pure hypocrisy of the government critics who blame Dr Webster’s administration for agreeing to the GST Act after he came to office.  Are they willing to step forward and say that he should have chosen the alternative?  Would they have supported him sending the civil servants home without pay in June 2020?  Of course not.  What he did instead was masterful.  He negotiated down the most onerous terms and conditions of the GST as agreed by the AUF administration.  He got them to agree to making the GST terms as light as he possibly could.

I hope to look at these in a later article.  I also hope to expose the mistaken, if not malicious, motives of some of his most vociferous critics.

Taxis

 

I vexed with the lack of enforcement of Anguilla’s road traffic and insurance laws.  To save a few dollars, some car rental agencies and taxi drivers cut corners and use uninsured and unlicensed vehicles to ply their trade.  And nobody does anything about it.  Yes, you heard me right:  uninsured and unlicensed vehicles are freely driving about the country, and none of them is stopped or prosecuted.  So, I heard on the radio government is going to introduce new policies, laws, and regulations to control the use of “P”, “R”, and “C” licensed vehicles as taxis.

In December, a visitor friend of mine went to his favourite car rental agency to rent a vehicle for the month he was in Anguilla.  He telephoned me to come and help.  The owner of the car rental agency offered to rent him a car with a “P” licence plate.  The visitor wanted to know from me if that was legal.

I went to the car rental company and asked to see the vehicle.  Sure enough, it had a “P” licence plate. 

First, I asked the proprietor if he had insurance to rent out such a vehicle.  He replied that he did it every day.  I asked him if he did not know it was illegal.  But it was insured, he insisted.  I tried to explain that a private vehicle insurance is cancelled if you rent it out.  It was illegal for him to rent out such a car, and it was illegal for the visitor to drive such a car on the public road.

You need go no further than examine your own certificate of insurance.  If it is a MAICO policy, as mine is, it is on the first page under paragraph “6. Limitations as to use”.  It clearly states that the vehicle is insured for, “Use only for social, domestic and pleasure purposes and for the Policy Holder’s business or profession.  THE POLICY DOES NOT COVER:- Use for hire or reward, rentals, racing, pacemaking, reliability trial, speed testing or use for any purpose in connection with the Motor Trade.”

The meaning is clear.  If you are found to have rented out your “P” or “C” licensed vehicle, or used it for taxiing, your insurance policy is cancelled.  You are now driving it without insurance.  That is a criminal offence under the laws of Anguilla carrying with it a hefty fine and term of imprisonment.  The tourist is committing the same offence and is liable to similar criminal sanctions.

So, you are driving an uninsured vehicle.  If you are caught renting out or using as a taxi a “P” or “C” licensed vehicle so that the insurance policy is void, the penalty used to be a fine of up to EC$1,000.00 or 3 months’ imprisonment.  It is probably more now.

And, once your insurance is void and as a result your vehicle is unregistered you and the tourist driver commit a further offence.  The fine is even greater.  It used to be up to $9,600.00 or 3 months’ imprisonment.  It is probably more now.

The rationale behind these regulations is obvious.  When you negotiate with your insurer for cover for a “P” licensed vehicle, the insurer quotes you a premium based on the promise that only you or someone you give permission to will use the vehicle.  The risk is small.  The premium is low.

If you are going to use your vehicle as a commercial vehicle with a “C” licence plate, valuable goods may be damaged.  The risk for the insurer is greater, so the premium will be greater than for a ”P” licensed vehicle.

If you are going to use the vehicle as a taxi, the risk for the insurer is even greater, so the premium is greater.  It is the same with the registration fees.

The annual fee for licensing a “P” vehicle is low.  A commercial licence costs more because you are driving it up and down the road all day long and causing more damage to the highway.  Also, you are making money from the vehicle.  So, you must pay government more money.  The registration fees are even more if it is a taxi.

It is a criminal offence punishable with fine or imprisonment for a taxi driver to use an “R” or a “P” or a “C” licensed vehicle as a taxi.  It is a criminal offence for a car rental company to rent out a “P” licensed vehicle.  And the driver can be charged with the same offence.

It is even worse.  The day a visitor is seriously injured in a rental car and has his case against the insurance company for compensation dismissed because he was driving a vehicle without the correct insurance, we will never hear the end of it.  Senators in the United States will ask questions of the US government.  Why are they not warning citizens to stay from an unregulated, bandit country such as Anguilla is?  We know how quickly that can happen.

So far as I can tell, there are dozens of unlicensed and uninsured vehicles driving about our roads with impunity.  The problem in Anguilla is not the need for more laws and regulations.  The problem is lack of enforcement of our existing laws and regulations.  Neither the police nor the government seem interested in enforcing our driving laws.

We know the reason.  We don’t want to turn innocent Anguillians into criminals.  So, we don’t enforce the existing road traffic laws.

So, tell me, how is that situation going to change by making new laws and regulations?