Reform the Senate completely

THE EDITOR: Did you know that in the UK Parliament – Westminster – members of the Upper House (the House of Lords) have lifetime appointments? In other words, they cannot be removed by a prime minister or leader of opposition once appointed. They sit in the Upper House over the span of several governments in their lifetimes and bring real institutional memory to the process of legislating.

In fact, that is the role of the Upper House – to bring some independent reflection and debate on bills passed or debated in the Lower House.

(And people automatically repeat the idea – like unthinking parrots – that we have a "Westminster" system of government.)

In the US, senators have longer terms that presidents – six years as opposed to four years. In addition, they are not appointed by any political directorate. They are elected.

This gives the US senators their independence from the House of Representatives and from the president. They are not dependent in any way on either. They are answerable to the people every six years.

What is the purpose of our Senate?

How can it provide independent oversight when everyone there is appointed on the whims of the Lower House, or the President (who herself is essentially voted in by the ruling party of the day)?

And why is there this strange formula, where when even the Lower House is divided 21-19 between Government and Opposition, the number of senators is fixed at 16 for the Government and only six for the Opposition?

(Yet people uncritically parrot the phrase that we have a "Westminster" system of government, because Eric Williams fooled them into saying so.)

I do want to say that we do have individual senators who perform excellently and take their role seriously. This critique is not about individuals. It is about the system.

Like so many other things in this country, we can blame Williams for this travesty. He changed our systems completely, and we have left them all in place, even 64 years later, as though they were ordained by God and untouchable.

I continue to be baffled by this deference.

Williams brought back the old crown colony system and called it a Senate. In the crown colony system you had the exact same fixed majority; token, dependent and emasculated opposition; and in the end – if somehow the vote didn't go as fixed – the governor could veto the outcome if he didn't like it.

That is what Williams brought back from the dead before independence in 1961, because we had gotten rid of that system in the years before 1956, and put in a far superior constitution. Williams hated that constitution, however, because it gave too much power to the Legislature.

Like Keith Rowley today, Eric Williams always argued that the Government's hands should not be "tied.” In other words, that the Government should always be able to do what it wants, without any real checks and balances. Fake ones are fine, but none with real power.

That is PNM ideology consistently from 1956 to 2020 and beyond, until we finally bury that relic of our colonial past – the PNM.

We need reform of the Senate now! It must be truly independent, not appointed by other political entities.

I wrote a book with Justice Peter Jamadar titled Democracy & Constitution Reform in Trinidad and Tobago, published in 2008, and chaired the Vision 2020 committee on constitutional reform in 2003-4, where such reforms were forwarded.

If we keep the Lower House with first past the post, we can have the Upper House elected using a PR system, in a totally different election which also elects an executive president.

More details can be found in the material cited, including the work I did with the late Lloyd Best in the TT Review.

Whatever the final form we agree upon, we must reform this joke of a PNM Senate. It must not be a rubber stamp and a mere reflection of the Lower House.

Let's turn the Senate into a real second chamber.

DR KIRK MEIGHOO

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