Since the CSO (Central Statistical Office) does not supply population and employment statistics on a regular basis anymore, it may have escaped the notice of many of us outside of academia the extent to which Dr Eric Williams's brand of state socialism as a philosophy of governance has been gradually not eroded but replaced over the years by private sector entrepreneurs who could not get the satisfaction from state corporations they were led to expect.
There was nothing malicious about the failures. It was like trying to apply the management systems of an Oxford University to a primary school in Penal. One size really never does, and never can, fit all.
Back in the 1900s, state enterprises in the metropole were set up to provide people with medical care, security, policing, education, sanitation and support for the dispossessed, the disabled and the elderly working in parallel with traditional family and faith-based systems that evolved over generations.
They were meant to replace the systems made inadequate by industrialisation. For efficacy they seem to have been overtaken step by step by private sector capitalism which resulted in the binary system under which we now operate.
Business entrepreneurs have encouraged and have profited hugely from the change and the most successful are now providing a quasi-paternalistic benevolent support in keeping the new system going where government run enterprises are seen to either never have managed, became corrupt or, by being staffed by political supporters whose qualifications for managerial authority lay solely in their political support, not their education, managerial standards, ethics and abilities, have simply failed.
I do not have to list them…they are in the press every day.
This is not any huge secret. I came across a paper written back in 1973 which commented on the observable beginnings of the trend, predicting what was going to happen and, as it turned out in fact, has happened.
It wasn't just here. There was an international debate going on at the time about the lack of efficiency, and productivity, observed worldwide in state enterprises.
Orwell's famous book Animal Farm was a metaphor for what happened when the animals took over the farm. It illustrated the terms: 'workers' participation in management', 'taking over the commanding heights of the economy', 'nationalization of resources' and 'workers ownership of business'.
Servol, of which I was an enthusiastic member, was proud of the bakery its workers set up. The National Union of Foods, Hotels, Beverages and Allied Workers set up their own grocery business to show how workers could provide food better and cheaper than the one per cent could.
Neither had managerial training or experience, just a belief they could do it better. Neither had the political skills to get favourable treatment to cut out competition. They went at it honestly. Neither lasted more than a year.
The intention was honourable: to replace the misery suffered by human beings under the centuries-old systems through
