The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

In her new offices at Marlborough House, home of the Commonwealth Secretariat, Baroness Scotland will be in the neighbourhood of none other than Her Majesty the Queen. The Regimental Band of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards can warm up in the Baroness’ new garden before popping over to perform at Buckingham Palace. Throw in a quarter million dollars a year salary and the use of a posh four-storey flat in one of London’s best areas and you see the makings of quite a comeback for the once humbled British Baroness. It’s a long way from there to Melville Hall, Dominica.

In a straw grab for pity Fred Mitchell inferred that the proffer of hypocrisy was misguided. He played the House for sympathy by gratuitously drawing the Mandela card. His spin was that it was implied that he kept company with those persons who shed crocodile tears at Nelson Mandela’s funeral having once cheered his imprisonment. No such implication could be drawn.

Fred, before he was a new PLP, before he was an FNM, before he was a Third Force and even before he was an old PLP, was a very vocal advocate of freedom for Mandela and for an end to apartheid in South Africa. I am sure the ever graceful and dignified Mandiba thanked Fred personally for his support when they met back in 1999.

Minister Mitchell needs to tell the House what happened at the United Nations in New York in September 2014. The CARICOM foreign ministers were scheduled to hold a coordination meeting on the sidelines of the General Assembly. When they arrived they found the Baroness Scotland sitting in the Dominica chair. This was a cheap stunt by Dominica’s youthful Prime Minister Ricky Skerritt to give the Baroness some Caribbean street cred.

The meeting mash up. The foreign ministers rightly objected to this foreign lady, a sitting member of the British Upper House, being present when sensitive regional matters were being discussed. She was unceremoniously disinvited before the meeting started.

Ricky Skerritt who became Prime Minister of Dominica 10 years ago at the age of 33 is an enigma. It seems that to him citizenship is a piece of paper to be used at one’s convenience. Until 2010 the Right Honourable gentleman held Dominican and French citizenship. He saw nothing wrong with a British woman wrapping herself in the Dominican flag to gain an advantage to which she was not entitled.

The principle of dominant and effective nationality is entrenched in international law. The 1930 Hague Convention says a dual national is to be treated as only possessing one nationality. Either the nationality of the country in which one is habitually or principally resident or the nationality of the country with which in the circumstances one is most closely connected. For the Baroness in either case the answer resoundingly is Britain.

Did our grand imperialist Fred collude with Ricky Skerritt in this embarrassing charade? After all he had pledged his personal support to her the year before. Or, as we Bahamians ask, “did he get swing” by the Baroness’ slick campaign handlers?

On the morning of November 25, two days before the vote, what had been a whispering campaign to malign Sir Ronald with discredited misinformation metastasized into a full-blown smear by the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, widely circulated in Malta. As a stand-alone issue, Sir Ronald might have been able to survive this, but taken in the totality of screw-ups by the Caribbean it was too much for the Pacific and African delegates to take. They abandoned the Caribbean and opted for the familiarity of Mother England.

By then sensing that the tide was turning against the Caribbean, Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth office scaled up their diplomatic offensive. The temptation to vote for the devil they knew was just too great.

Fred needs to tell the House the extent of his lobbying and campaigning on behalf of the Baroness. But to admit to any kind of advocacy for the Baroness when cabinet might have said otherwise would put him over the line in undermining cabinet. If he did so then he must resign.

Fred will continue to give opaque answers to serious questions. The latest spin is that after Perry (and cabinet) agreed to support Sir Ronald, the endorsement was watered down to lukewarm support, dependent upon how the wind was blowing just before CHOGM.

Sadly, this whole election of Baroness Scotland has left a lot of bad blood in the Caribbean with fingers being pointed at the Bahamas. Very rarely has CARICOM not spoken with one voice on foreign policy matters. It has left Fred Mitchell badly exposed. Why was he giving personal advice to someone who consulted him because she rightly thought he was the Bahamas Foreign Minister?

Is he as culpable as Renward Wells in making policy of his own volition? Was Christie kept in the dark the whole time? If not, he was as two-faced as the Foreign Minister when he led CARICOM to believe that he would coalesce around Antigua and Barbuda’s candidate.

Recall that in February this year Christie chaired a meeting of CARICOM Prime Ministers in Nassau that was to endorse Sir Ronald. Clearly Fred was not having it and so instead of Perry doing as expected as Chair by leaning on Dominica and Barbados to abstain from voting against Sir Ronald in the spirit of CARICOM unity, Perry waffled and prevaricated as usual and may even have emboldened Skerritt to press on with the Baroness, CARICOM unity be damned. That appears to be exactly what Fred wanted.

Perry must explain how nine clear votes for Sir Ronald with only Dominica and Barbados against collapsed into a vote of no confidence in the choice of nine out of 11 Prime Ministers?

Or was it simply that Sir Ronald’s traditional low-key, low-budget, meet-and-greet style campaign was simply no match to the Baroness’ glitzy, big-budget, take-no-prisoners, schmooze-and-booze, next-best-thing-to-British-royalty campaign? We all know how much Fred loves celebrities, given the frequent visits to Los Angeles, California.

Cabinet ministers need to stop sucking their teeth when Fred leaves the room and demand some answers lest they all look like a bunch of weasels and we Bahamians look like sometimey friends to our Caribbean family.

The Bahamas had an opportunity to punch above its weight on a very important foreign policy matter. Our credulous foreign minister blew it big time. Congratulations Baroness. Well played.

The Graduate

Nassau,

December 13, 2015.