Editorial: Death and the welfare

The late Errol Barrow

Thu, October 28, 2010 - 12:00 AM

THE RECENT DEATH of Prime Minister David Thompson was a shock to all of us, especially since death is not accepted as a youthful experience. It is seen as just reward for those of advancing years.

A generation of our political and business leaders who laid the foundation for our nation is passing on. Unfortunately, the majority of them are not leaving behind any memoirs that would help the next generation know where our country came from and where we intended to go.

It is a pity our academics and our learning institutions have equally not taken time to document the lives and times of these founding leaders.

There is no comprehensive book on either National Heroes Sir Grantley Adams or Errol Barrow focusing on their politics and tenure as the Founding Fathers of this nation.

That is why any effort and discipline by anyone to compile a book on the life and times of these pivotal men would be highly commendable. It is essential that we capture an era in our politics that has never been adequately researched or published on; and that is the history of the progressive movement in Barbados.

The story of that early movement has not been fully told because it was unsafe to do so and because the forces of status quo had been determined to have history written or rewritten in their own image, after their own likeness.

However, times are changing all across the globe that may reshape the early political thinking which is rightly undergoing some review.

One concept of the early political thought was the idea of the welfare state which was described by its intellectual architect, Lord Beveridge, as a structure built to protect the individual “from the cradle to the grave”. Its original concept was to protect the poor and vulnerable in society.

All these concepts owe their origins to aristocrats much like the Keynesian theory of economics. These models came to dominate every West European country, with local traditions and local politics dictating the diversity of its application.

By the 1960s, all of democratic Europe was social democratic, a combination of free markets and mass social protection.

The models were attractive and most leaders in the Third World trained in Britain borrowed these models and tried to apply them to underdeveloped countries without first expanding the economic bases, with largely disastrous consequences.

The European welfare model succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imagination and, for decades, was the envy of the world in a way that neither American capitalism nor Russian state socialism ever could be.

The financial costs built into this model were not sustainable and many economies began to decline, with high unemployment becoming a permanent fixture. We have come full circle as welfare benefits the middle class even more so than it does the poor.

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Posted by Pan Wallie 1 year, 6 months ago: Good article. We need to have our history documented. Paragraph #6 describes very accurately why this has not occurred. We ought not to let this be a hindrance, recognising that each and every one of us has certain perceptions of events and that varying opinions does not necessarily depict inaccuracy, but should serve to generate deeper interest in research. We have able historians and significant people who should forge ahead. It is better to make a start and deal with the challenges as they surface, than to lose out totally as our authentic informants lose memory or pass on.