JNF-The-Working-Class-Struggle-of-Half-a-Century

The Northern Islands are an integral part of any BWI Federation.
Their political backwardness has hitherto retarded the progress of
the whole group. The Closer Union Commission has in any event assisted
the birth of political consciousness in Antigua, St. Kitts, Nevis
and Montserrat and it has freed all the Leeward Islands from the
nightmare of a forced union in which executive decisions were usually
made by a small quorum of the Federal Executive, consisting of members
permanently resident at headquarters who were as a rule completely
out of touch with public opinion in the neighboring presidencies,
and preoccupied with the requirements of Antigua and the interests of
their classes. Is that a negligible achievement?
But the waves of controversy heat most fiercely around the reservation
of powers of veto and certification and it is in this connection
that some commentators have shown themselves lamentably unfamiliar
with British constitutional history and practice...
The Grenada Resolution to the effect that ‘no power is to be reserved
to the people, that they may exercise the right and duty of the
levying of taxes and the expending thereof, in matters of domestic routine
as apart from legitimate questions of how high imperial policy’ and
that ‘the report denies to the people of the West Indies as a whole some
opportunity to begin their education in self-government’ is based on a
palpable misconstruction of the report.
Electives will now have an opportunity for the display of
statesmanship and must in the future regard themselves as instruments
of Government, rather than as obstacles to Government, since the responsibility
for executive decisions and for the framing of the policy will
rest largely on the shoulders of the unofficial members of the Executive
Council.
For this reason I am sanguine that the unreasonable exercise of
the power of certification is highly improbable. It cannot be too often
repeated that the interests of Government and governed are fundamentally
identical; and that no sane administration will want only to seek to
create dissatisfaction among the people. And in the event of any conflict
arising between the officer administering the government and the
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