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On a Wing-Collar & a Prayer

THE LAW ASSOCIATION of Trinidad & Tobago last week passed votes of no confidence in the Chief Justice, which might seem like maggots voting no confidence in their own dead rat.

And, yesterday, the United Kingdom had the chance to dump their own well-dressed and immaculately-coiffured rat by

rejecting, as prime minister, the woman who bet her political future campaigning against any Brexit at all and then, when she somehow squeezed into the PM’s seat, did her best to get a hard one. How lucky all of us in the world would be today if, yesterday, Brits remembered there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Superstitious Christians – which is to say, “Christians” – often point out that the Devil’s greatest trick was to convince us that he did not exist; like the Devil, the free market’s great trick is to have convinced the world that only capitalism could develop nations.

We’ve all lived through the glaring evidence against the proposition ourselves. In our time, the free market has gone way past its indubitably useful/beneficial stage and is now as great a chokehold on human progress as the Labour that wasn’t working; the Harold Wilson and James Callaghan governments of the Seventies were the swing of the pendulum too far to the left that put all power in the hands of the trades unions; the appointments of neurosurgeons could have been vetoed by a union shop steward.

Having all power in the hands of capital is just as bad, indeed worse: better to have a labourer who knows what it is to see hungry children at home calling the shots than a superrich wanker who’s never understood why people who complain about traffic just don’t get a helicopter.

How long must we suffer before we admit that it’s not an either/or thing, that the market works best when it’s not 100 per cent free?

Capitalism, unchecked, has brought us global environmental and individual economic disaster, the cancer of for-profit-healthcare, the bailing out of billionaire fraudsters by the combined pennies of sufferers and the accelerated monopolization of wealth & power in the hands of the very few at the very top.

What looks like progress in Mumbai is actually devastation in Baltimore.

But we have ploughed on in the same deepening furrow with a shit-eating grin on our faces. Capital’s most fervent local high priest was just last week thrown out on his ass, a victim of the system for which he advocated at every opportunity; somehow, even people burned by it see, not the raging fire of money, but its light.

Capital thrives on fear, not hope. The only place Tories want to see optimism is in the market, which values money, not human beings – except insofar as they, or their internal (or external sexual) organs, can be traded like any other commodity. English people are buying houses they can’t afford just to get their children into half-decent schools and only the rich can send their children to university.

The Tories’ aim is to take England back to the pre-WWI social order, where the gentry gives the order to go over the top and the peasantry tugs its forelock and piles its bodies high to the glory of the Union Jack. Their signal achievement has been to pull Britain out of the European Union, the greatest coming together in the name of peace and prosperity in all human endeavour.

But people are still “afraid of Labour”; how, pray tell, could Labour make it worse? Apart from taxing, at a higher rate, people who are already well off, to help people who need a hand-up?

And, here at home, how, pray tell, can the Chief Justice going make our dead-in-the-water legal system better?

Now I happen to be a lawyer myself – or at least, to the best of my knowledge, have not yet been debarred. Anyone can see that Chief Justice Ivor Archie has plainly made a huge mess of the appointment of judges. If I were he, I’d have gone already: my embarrassment would be greater than any principle I could put forward by way of bat-and-pad.

But why should the head of the Bar be shamed by the kind of Bar that people of principle should prefer to be turned away from than called to? Staying in the full disclosure crease the Association en masse seems to have overstepped, I confess that the last few LATT presidents have been my friends; indeed, at UWI Cave Hill, I shared a flat with the current president.

But has no one reminded my learned friends, most of whom I’ve never met, that, when you point your finger at someone, three point back at you? (Who say, “prison litigation”?) There are good people at the Bar; I can vouch for the current and three of the last four past presidents; but, you can’t take seriously a profession that not only tolerates, but celebrates, a group called “Lawyers for Jesus”.

Whatever else his failings, CJ Archie has one glowing credential worthy of fanning even at its faintest ember: he separates his own religious belief from the office he holds and the power he wields; as a Christian, he may believe homosexuality is an abomination; as CJ, he has championed the rights of the LGBT. If only for that conscious separation of private and the public obligations, more people – like the Cabinet & Parliament – would be better off emulating that than ejecting him.

And the Law Association would be spared looking like rats crawling through your toilet on their way to a sewer with more faecal matter and even darker tunnels to hide in; their natural habitat.

I advise accordingly.

BC Pires is called only to the bar at the club but will lift a glass to UK PM JC

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