Playground politics

BOTH CAMILLE Robinson-Regis and Kamla Persad-Bissessar are wrong.

They should know better. They should respect one another. They should recognise the power of words, especially when they utter them.

Meanwhile, the intervention of the Prime Minister in their name-calling spat has got us nowhere. He has exercised his right to chime in with a history lesson. But in the process, he also repeated the same name-calling as his minister, failing to distinguish himself from her.

Indeed, Ms Robinson-Regis’s opening volley of calling out the Opposition Leader’s full name repeatedly at a PNM meeting in Arima on May 24 was done in the presence of and possibly with the approval of Dr Rowley.

There can be no doubt that Ms Robinson-Regis intended her gesture to be pejorative. She repeated the name in the context of attacking Ms Persad-Bissessar for criticising the PNM’s record on child abuse.

Ms Persad-Bissessar’s response was in a similar vein when, a UNC meeting in New Grant on June 2, she fired back, telling Ms Robinson-Regis that at least she got her name from her ancestors as opposed to a slave master. It was a completely inappropriate and insensitive allusion to a painful history.

Though both are victims of one another, neither of these women comes to this conflict with clean hands.

Ms Robinson-Regis’s long history of inappropriate political platform remarks includes her infamous “put a real woman” jibe from 2020.

Meanwhile, Ms Persad-Bissessar is on record as describing the Prime Minister as an “Oreo.”

You could say, and people like noted historian Prof Brinsley Samaroo only a few weeks ago did, that our politicians are tragic players in an unfolding colonial history in which the British divided our society to rule us.

But there is another way of looking at things. These politicians, because they are repeat offenders, may well have calculated that dog-whistling – sending coded messages – will help them get votes.

If so, they should be warned of the dangerous consequences. Such an approach can never be a substitute for fresh ideas and for policy.

Politicians who wish to traffic in insularity and hate should look to the fate of former US president Donald Trump in 2020 and, more recently, US Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was deeply wounded in a confidence vote by his own MPs at Westminster on Monday.

The irony is, this most unedifying of spats began because of the failure of successive governments to do enough to tackle child abuse and to raise standards within care homes.

While politicians waste time bickering and posting videos on Facebook, children continue to suffer.

The people we have trusted to lead the country are setting a poor example for children looking on.

Instead of the standard of behaviour expected of parliamentarians, we are getting behaviour fit, and barely so, for the playground or schoolyard.