Saint Kitts & Nevis - Early Politics
The political history of St. Kitts and Nevis is closely intertwined with its economic development (or lack of it). The issue of land is at the heart of Kittitian politics. The dominance by estate owners of this already limited natural resource and the single-minded application of that resource to one industry precluded the development of a stable peasant class. Instead, the system produced a large class of wage laborers generally resentful of foreign influence. The nature of the sugar industry itself — the production of a nonstaple and essentially nonnutritive commodity for a widely fluctuating world market — only served to deepen this hostility and to motivate Kittitian laborers to seek greater control over their working lives and their political situation.
The collapse of sugar prices brought on by the Great Depression precipitated the birth of the organized labor movement in St. Kitts and Nevis. The Workers League, organized by Robert Bradshaw in 1932, tapped the popular frustration that fueled the labor riots of 193 5—36. Rechristened the St. Kitts and Nevis Trades and Labour Union in 1940, the union established a political arm, the St. Kitts and Nevis Labour Party, which put Bradshaw in the Legislative Council in 1946. The Labour Party would go on to dominate political life in the twin-island state for more than thirty years.
The People's Action Movement (PAM) arose as an expression of middle-class opposition to the political dominance of the Labour Party. According to most observers, the reaction of the Labour government to this challenge was not a positive one. The PAM's relatively strong showing in 1966, the first year it participated in elections, apparently alerted the Labourites to the potential strength of the opposition movement. The government's initial reaction to this threat was to declare a state of emergency inJune 1967, under which twenty-two PAM members were arrested. Efforts to prosecute the detainees were abandoned by the government after the first two defendants were acquitted. Both the founder of the PAM, William Herbert, and party leader Simmonds, among others, gave accounts of harassment, imprisonment, mistreatment, and confiscation of property at the hands of the Labour government.
During its long tenure, Bradshaw's Labour government moved increasingly toward a statist approach to economic development. This tendency culminated in 1975, when the government took control of all sugarcane fields. It assumed ownership of the central sugar factory in Basseterre, the capital, the following year. By this time, opponents of the Labour government had discerned a corresponding tendency toward political rigidity and even repression, mainly through the vehicle of the St. Christopher and Nevis Defence Force. Resentment of Labour rule was particularly acute on Nevis, where citizens not only saw themselves as neglected and ignored politically but also felt that their island was being unfairly deprived of services and revenue by its larger neighbor. Nevisian disenchantment with the Labour Party proved a key factor in the party's eventual fall from power.
The decline of the Labour Party was marked by the passing of its longtime leader, Bradshaw, in 1978. He was replaced as premier (the pre-independence title for prime minister) of St. Kitts and Nevis by a close associate, C. Paul Southwell. When Southwell died only one year later, the government and the party fell into a leadership crisis that strained the unity required to fend off a growing opposition. The new Labour leader, Lee Moore, apparently was unprepared to fill the void left by Bradshaw and Southwell.
By 1979, the political opposition had coalesced into two party groupings, one on St. Kitts, the other on Nevis. The Kittitian opposition party was the People's Action Movement (PAM), a middle-class organization founded in 1965 on the heels of a protest movement against a government-ordered increase in electricity rates. The PAM first participated in elections in 1966. Its platform eventually came to advocate economic diversification away from sugar and toward tourism, increased domestic food production, reduction of the voting age to eighteen, and increased autonomy for Nevis.
On Nevis, the party that came to enjoy widespread support was the Nevis Reformation Party (NRP). Established in 1970, the NRP advocated secession from St. Kitts as the only solution to the island's lack of autonomy. Campaigning almost exclusively on this issue, the party won 80 percent of the vote on Nevis in the elections of 1975, capturing both Nevisian seats in the legislature. Labour's decline was confirmed by the elections of 1980.
Although Labour outpolled the PAM on St. Kitts, taking four seats to three, the NRP again captured both seats on Nevis. This made possible the formation of a PAM/NRP coalition government in the House of Assembly (the legislative body that succeeded the colonial Legislative Council) with a bare majority of five seats to four, a development that placed the Labour Party in the unfamiliar role of parliamentary opposition. Kennedy Simmonds, a medical doctor and one of the founders of the PAM, assumed the post of premier (Simmonds had won Bradshaw's former seat in a 1979 by-election). Simeon Daniel, the leader of the NRP, was appointed minister of finance and Nevis affairs.
PAM also showed that it could play political hardball after it came to power in coalition with the NRP in 1980. In 1981 the government ended the practice of "check-off" deduction of dues from the paychecks of members of the St. Kitts and Nevis Trades and Labour Union (SKNTLU), considerably complicating efforts by the Labour Party's union arm to raise revenues.
The 1980 elections represented a definitive political shift in the federation, marking the end of SKNLP dominance. Though the Labour Party won more votes than the opposition Political Action Movement (PAM) taking four seats to three on St. Kitts, the NRP captured both seats on Nevis. The PAM and NRP were thus able to form a coalition government in the House of Assembly, forcing the SKNLP into opposition for the first time. The advent of a Kittian-Nevisian coalition reduced demands for secession as the only way to overcome the limited autonomy then afforded to Nevis. Instead, a deal was struck to make newly independent St. Kitts and Nevis a two-island federation in which Nevis would be granted considerable autonomy through a local assembly.
PAM-associated unions also challenged the SKNTLU for membership, particularly among dock workers. In a move that was eventually blocked in the courts, the government attempted to shut down the headquarters of the SKNTLU (the so-called Masses House) by foreclosure through the National Bank. Ironically, this action replicated a similar effort by the Labour government in 1969, when the PAM's headquarters was purchased by the goverIment and members were turned away by armed Defence Force personnel. Some observers felt that the PAM/NRP government took matters a step too far when it arrested Labour leader Moore in April 1987 for "utter[ingj seditious words." Moore was quickly released on bond to the acclaim of a group of supporters.
The change in government reduced the demand for Nevisian secession. Most Nevisians had long focused their objections to Kittitian government on the Labour Party. The PAM, advocating as it did an enhanced autonomy for Nevis, facilitated the incorporation of the NRP and its followers into national life. The PAM/NRP coalition also cleared the way for the national independence of St. Kitts and Nevis as a two-island federation. Although Simmonds and the PAM had formerly stated their opposition to full independence, they now reversed themselves, citing economic advances since the change of government and the prospect of further development through increased foreign aid after a formal separation from Britain. Accordingly, the coalition hammered out a constitution that granted Nevis considerable autonomy as well as a guaranteed right of secession. A constitutional conference was held in London in December 1982, and St. Christopher and Nevis was declared an independent state on September 19, 1983.
Although Moore had participated in the constitutional conference, the Labour Party expressed strong objections to many provisions of the new Constitution, particularly those dealing with Nevis. The arrangement worked out by the PAM and NRP, it claimed, was not a true federation, since St. Kitts was not granted the same powers of local government as Nevis, i.e., there was no separate Kittitian legislature, and was not allowed the same right of secession.
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