The recent celebration of Republic Day had the added event of the National Awards ceremony which has traditionally been held on Independence Day. The intention behind moving the National Awards ceremony to Republic Day was designed to raise the level of consciousness associated with the day itself.
However, in doing so, there still remain issues that tie us to our colonial past in some official documents that raise issues of identity in the context of our republican status.
The first of these issues relates to the 2014 Standing Orders of our House of Representatives in which parts of Standing Order 2 have the following provisions:
“(2) In any matter not provided for in these Standing Orders, resort shall be had to the usage and practice of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom which shall be followed as far as they may be applicable to this House and not inconsistent with these Standing Orders or with the practice of this House.
(3) In cases of doubt the Standing Orders of this House shall be interpreted in the light of the relevant usage and practice of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, but no restrictions which the House of Commons has introduced by Standing Order shall be deemed to extend to this House or its Members until the House has provided by Standing Order for such restriction.” This raises the question that our Parliament is expected to follow a particular pathway in which its default position is locked into the former colonial connection. This creates a dependence on practice and procedure in the Westminster Parliament for the resolution of issues not covered by the Standing Orders.
The absence of any indigenous or innovative regulatory provisions that are of the native soil as opposed to the continued reliance on the Westminster connection is a matter of debate.
Our Constitution at Section 55(3) provides that the “powers, privileges and immunities of each House...until so defined shall be those of the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom…”
While the thinking behind all of this might have suited the transition from a monarchy to a republic in 1976, it represents a significant reliance on the Westminster Parliament to be the fallback locator for anything that cannot be resolved locally.
This is an issue of consciousness that must be considered in terms of our evolution to a higher level of thinking about the identity of our institutions. The Westminster model in the United Kingdom has moved on from what it once was. It has adopted some Washington model techniques as regards scrutiny committees which were introduced in 1979 and we followed suit, after much resistance, to emulate that model for departmental joint select committees in 1999.
In the UK, there was also the Fixed term Parliaments Act 2013 which introduced fixed dates for elections (another Washington model example) with a parliamentary modification to permit exceptions for earlier elections thereby abolishing the right of the Prime Minister to request a dissolution of Parliament. Those exceptions are (i) the loss of a motion of no confidence by the Government, and (ii) a resolution passed with a two-thirds majority of the House of Commons for an early election (which happened in April this year in the UK).
While Westminster has moved on, our constitutions in the region have remained locked in a time zone of no change.
In the Eastern Caribbean, there have been rejections of constitutional reforms at referenda in St Vincent in 2009 and Grenada in 2016. Constitutional reform has also not been successful here despite the efforts of Patrick Manning and Kamla Persad-Bissessar.
There is a persistence of the Westminster-style model here, while knighthoods and membership of Her Majesty’s Privy Council arise for other West Indian political and judicial elites which creates a bipolar approach to regional constitutional reform.