“Test all things.” I no longer regard scepticism as discourtesy. When people exercising great power make grand claims, the citizen has not merely a right but a responsibility to ask: Where is the evidence? So when Prime Minister Andrew Holness told the Caribbean Infrastructure Forum in Miami on September 15 that “Jamaica will become the Singapore of the Caribbean”, I reached instinctively for several grains of salt. Singapore? That is an assertion capable of measurement

Why, despite decades of policy recognition, legislation, licensing and official declarations, does the ordinary Jamaican still experience beach access as a contested privilege rather than an unquestioned component of citizenship? That question cannot be answered by blaming one hotel. Nor should it be reduced to a crude argument against tourism or private investment. Jamaica needs tourism. But JM does not need a tourism model in which the profitable natural asset is progre

A democratic State requires institutions, experts, journalists, academics, civil servants, opposition politicians and citizens willing to identify danger before danger becomes disaster. Their responsibility is not simply to possess information. It is to interpret it honestly and communicate it intelligibly. A trumpet that makes an uncertain sound defeats its very purpose... Read More Online

“If the judges cannot get along, how can we trust them to settle our disputes?” That question may be unfair. But it is real. And public confidence is not built by telling citizens that they are foolish for asking difficult questions. It is built by answering those questions. I therefore write this not as an opponent of the CCJ but as a Caribbeanist who desperately wants it to succeed. I want the CCJ to become the trusted final court of the Caribbean. I want our child