Leader of the Opposition Ralph Thorne firmly rejected any attempt to amend the Constitution to designate the Speaker of the House as an “independent person” while allowing the current Speaker of the House, Arthur Holder MP, to remain in the role, insisting the position must be truly impartial and cannot be occupied by a partisan figure.
Thorne insisted that the Speaker cannot be one day a “political person” and the next an “independent person.”
Speaking in the House of Assembly on Tuesday on the parliamentary the Constitutional Amendment Bill and the Parliamentary Miscellaneous Provisions Bill, which were led by Prime Minister Mia Mottley, he said: “This country will not be persuaded that the present holder of the office of speaker can occupy that office now and, after the passage of this amendment, continue in the office of independent speaker. It cannot happen.”
“Lord Chief Justice Hewart spoke about the appearance of justice, that it must not only be done, but be seen, manifestly be seen to be done. And I say to the Honourable Prime Minister, that is not justice.”
“It would be unfair to the Honourable Speaker as he is presently to occupy the office that he does now and then hold ambitions to occupy an office of a different nature. He cannot cease to be a partisan Speaker today, Tuesday, and come back next week and tell the public, I am no longer a partisan Speaker, I am independent and impartial.”
“Not in this Barbados, not in this Parliament . . . . It is a caution to the government, that if we push through this amendment, if this Parliament with its abundant government numbers managed to make this the law against what may be public protests, then the government would be compounding its problems, its many problems within the public domain, by seeking to retain the present holder of the office after this amendment.”
Thorne, the lone person on the opposition benches, also criticised government MPs, many of whom were absent at the start of the debate on the constitutional amendment. He insisted that any time a government sought to change the Barbados Constitution, it was a matter that ought to be treated as a priority by MPs.
According to Thorne: “Government has lost a lot of time in presenting to this public a genuinely new republican constitution. Now, if today’s amendment is an aspect of a republican constitution, we applaud it. But what we cannot and will not applaud is this incremental attention to constitutional change.”
(IMC)
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