Tag Archives: Noble Philip

This week has been awfully long. How the worm has turned! On Thursday 3 June, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley announced that US vice-president Kamala Harris had promised a substantial vaccine donation.  On Saturday 5 June, he informed that the country had secured 800,000 Johnson & Johnson vaccines with an …

The efforts needed to coordinate the necessary actions to combat Covid-19 should induce wide-scale collaboration. A government cannot act on its own but must bring along the wider society. Polarised positions negatively impact the effective societal response.  When there are difficult new situations, and the media is the prominent news provider, …

It is indisputable that Covid-19 represents the most significant health and economic threat faced in this generation. We have had raging arguments about the effects of efforts to contain the virus. Achieving the scale of the required changes in personal behaviour is challenging, but such changes are integral to success.  …

‘I bawled for two hours. I wanted to mash-up everything in the house.’ These poignant words from a mother who lost an adult child have haunted me this week. The young woman had been discharged from one of our hospitals after being warded for approximately two weeks.  Five patients were …

In considering the present local situation, Aristotle was right when he said: ‘What is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care. Men pay most attention to what is their own; they care less for what is common or at any rate, they care for it only …

In the book Pilgrim’s Progress, John Banyan wrote: ‘The road of denial leads to a precipice.’  He describes a hill called Error that was easy to climb but steep on the other side. At its foot were the bones of many who Flatterer deceived. He had coaxed the pilgrims to …

‘Dislike of an individual is material in politics. Someone with an unlikeable persona may be unelectable in a diverse national contest… by contrast, good governance requires honest treatment of the business issues…’ (Martin Daly, November 2020). This Daly quote is relevant when considering the recent cabinet reshuffle in the light …

Living in the pandemic required us all to rearrange our daily lives in both patient and clever ways. But it has been a long, tiring year.  As we look into the future, there is a growing realisation that Covid-19 will forever shadow us. Consequently, we must decide how much of …

The recent utterances of a UWI economist about our economy (‘dire straits’) had me scampering for a Lloyd Best quote: ‘Palpably, we lack the pegs on which to hang ongoing events, and which would allow us to convert arbitrary detail into a systematic pattern, arithmetic into algebra, the specific into …

In a week shortened by the long Easter weekend, we ended up exhausted and battered.  While our neighbours in St Vincent contend with a raging volcano, we wreck our society. They would lose their livelihoods, and some will need to be evacuated outside of the country. We are voluntarily destroying …

The Mark Twain quote ‘facts are stubborn, statistics are flexible’ seemed appropriate last week, as the news about New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s misclassification of 9,000 Covid-19 deaths broke, shattering the carefully groomed image of his pandemic achievements as a national leader.  Cuomo, ably assisted by his aides, sought to …

‘The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.’ — John Philpot Curran (1790). As a nation, we are sliding into a place of great sadness. The economy’s growth engines are shutting down, and there is a collapse of law and order. Daily, it becomes more …