Opposition Parliamentarians in Anguilla, Hubert Hughes and Edison Baird, responded on Wednesday to the Government’s proposed austerity measures with much criticism saying there would have been no need for that course of action had more attention been paid to careful spending and savings “for the rainy day.”

L-R: Hon. Edison Baird and Hon. Hubert Hughes

Both of them cast aside reporters’ questions whether they were simply taking advantage of the current economic and financial situation impacting Anguilla to level their charges against the Government for political mileage.

One of the Government’s proposed austerity measures is the curtailing of constituency, entertainment and telephone allowances for Elected Members of the House of Assembly and possibly, later on, a reduction of their salaries as an example to the public service. On this matter, Mr. Baird was not very responsive, stating only that it had not been discussed with them. Mr. Hughes, on the other hand, indicated that money was not a problem for him as he had been accustomed to providing free public service for Anguilla over the years. He charged, however, that Ministers were highly being paid far more than the Opposition Members and suggested that the politically-appointed Special Assistants should be relieved of their jobs as a cost-saving measure.
“This is massive confusion and the Government has lost its way,” Mr. Hughes said of the austerity measures. “I would state categorically that the Government should resign. Government must admit that it is now a lame duck; elections are constitutionally due in less than a year and everything from now onwards will be deemed as electioneering. We need to have a pure situation. Let’s get rid of the elections first; the sooner, the better. I believe the Government should call those elections and if the people want to give them a mandate, then they would not have to worry about political expediencies. They would have got the politics out of the way.”

Mr. Hughes, who accused the Government of living lavishly like the leaders of the oil-rich Gulf States, charged that “their take home pay of the Ministers was not commensurate with the little work they do for that money.” He went on: “We in the Opposition expect that we will be victimized but we are ready for that victimisation. This Government started off with something that I never thought the Foreign and Commonwealth Office would agree to because even the Governor and the Deputy Governor at the time assured me that on no account the FCO would agree with an Overseas Territory appointing their special fans and giving them jobs as political appointments…The whole idea is that this Government has lived lavishly; has wasted the monies they should have had in the reserved funds to take care of contingencies. It is known that you have to save for a rainy day.

“We have done quite a bit of sacrifice in our economic resources. We have squandered our lands especially our key economic zones of Cove Bay, Rendezvous Bay and Cocoloba Bay…and up to this day the Government has not shown me the production for one hotel project in the nine plus years it has been in office.” He said that on the contrary, this Government had turned around the economy despite three massive hurricanes in 1995, 1996 and 1999. Our economy kept constant. We never had to introduce austerity measures and the Caribbean Development Bank said two years after we were in office that the Anguilla economy was robust.

Ras B, of Upbeat Radio, asked Mr. Hughes: “Realistically, you said the Government should resign and call elections which is the Government’s choice and which it is not doing. What do you say in the circumstances: isn’t it a wise thing to pursue these austerity measures, given the circumstances?”
“Sir, I just came back from St. Thomas where the Federal Government has just donated nearly four hundred million dollars to the Virgin Islands Government to tide them over. We are closer to Britain today than we were when we left Government. We are now a British Overseas Territory. We are part of Britain and if bail-out procedures are being implemented in Britain, and since we are part of Britain, those bail-out procedures should affect us. But do you know why they don’t? Because the British have been warning the Anguilla Government all along not to give out these lavish concessions to real estate exploiters…”

Asked what he would have done had he been leading the Government in today’s economic crisis, Mr. Hughes replied: “My Government would not have had this problem and, first of all, we would have acted within the rules.” He did not say what those rules were.

Mr. Baird charged that the Government had not prepared for the slowdown period. “What the Government has failed to realise is that in any capitalist economy, you have boom and burst and, even though the economy grows rapidly at some point in time, it will level off and then begin to decline. That is the history of capitalist economies throughout the world and that’s why we were warning the Government to set aside monies for the rainy day….It all comes back to the fact that the Government did not pursue a sensible economic policy. They operated on the assumption that every day in Anguilla is Christmas and that the money would simply be flowing into the Treasury. A good indicator of how the economy is doing is simply to go to Blowing Point and Sandy Ground, see what cargo is coming in and how many people are coming in [from St. Maarten]. Fewer and fewer ships have been coming to Sandy Ground and fewer and fewer people were coming in through Blowing Point… Import duties constitute over 30% of the total revenue collected by the Government and when you see activity falls off, watch out, something is happening to our economy.”

Mr. Baird said he was very much concerned over the Flag project. He was of the view that the golf course by itself was not a profitable enterprise and was not supportive of Government’s decision to take it over. “A golf course makes sense when you surround it with a hotel, restaurants and other amenities that bring in money,” he stated. “What we are now having is a situation where the developer is heaving off the golf course which is the unprofitable part of Flag Luxuries and essentially dumping it into the lap of the taxpayers of Anguilla. The new developers do not want the golf course but the other facilities. This raises the relevant question: why is it that they do not want the golf course? They do not want it because it is the unprofitable part of the whole entity. If they could heave off that part to the Government, and to the taxpayers, and still have access to the golf course, that is the best of both worlds from the developers’ standpoint.”

He said that in his view the best model would be “for the hotels to get together, form a company and take over and run the golf course.” He did not believe that “the taxpayers, in the form of the Government, should be responsible for running the golf course.” He stated that such “stand alone” projects across the United States were in trouble.
Mr. Hughes supported Mr. Baird’s views stating that a golf course was “not really an economic venture.”

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