I can still remember the excitement when the Coalition for Cayman (C4C) came on the scene last year at the end of November when well over a thousand of us assembled in the AL Thompson’s parking lot.

We wanted a change from the appalling scenes and rhetoric coming from our elected members of the Legislative Assembly that we had been putting up with for almost four years. Corruption, attacks on the Governor, walkouts by members, threats coming from the United Kingdom to toe the line or else, secrecy, leaked documents, disharmony, etc, etc, and the worst of all – NOTHING BEING DONE TO PUT OUR COUNTRY BACK ON THE RIGHT ROAD TO RECOVERY.

Most of the country was disgusted, disillusioned and above all worried.

We had a government ruled by a man who was about to be charged with a number of criminal charges. His cabinet members and backbenchers seemed merely to be there as puppets on a string for the puppet master to bring them to life when he deemed fit.

We had a most ineffective opposition who complained at everything put forward by the government, often correctly so, but with NO ALTERNATIVE PLAN OR PROPOSAL OFFERED. They even resorted to the childlike antics of walking out in protest and resorted to a ridiculous piece of so called theatrics out in the street to stage their version of the Legislative Assembly proceedings.

All they achieved was to mock the building they were supposed to have been in and not carry out the business of the day they were elected and paid to do.

Then the Speaker of the House decided to put her two penny worth in by ordering the police to remove the spectators and partakers in this spectacle a few hundred yards away from the Legislative Assembly building. The whole world had the pleasure of seeing the handicapped, ill and now sadly departed Consuela Ebanks being dumped into her wheelchair! Disgraceful!

So we did want change. We were begging for it. We love our Country.

To a certain extent we liked what we heard at the inaugural  but……  and this was a very big but …… we were not told everything. Who was behind the C4C? A group of concerned citizens. With Austin Harris as MC and Rooster and Z99 doing the bulk of the advertising it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to work out who one of the persons was. “Put Country First” was the message shouted and we all cheered and clapped.

Unfortunately, exactly like a firework, it soars, we go “Ahhhhh, we clap, it looks so wonderful … and then it dies and I am describing the C4C.

It lost its momentum because for weeks nothing happened.

Take last Monday night (13). At the C4C campaign rally in West Bay, all seven of their endorsed independent candidates, were on show and it was televised live on the local television station CITN/Cayman27.

Roy McTaggart, Winston Connolly, Jacqueline Haynes, Jude Scott, Mervin Smith, Tara Rivers and Sharon Roulstone are the C4C endorsed independents.

I have said enough already on what I think of this “endorsed” tag so let that one lie.

Each one of these seven persons is a well respected citizen of the these islands. They are accountants, lawyers, business owners, and all have given of their time freely to help the community.

They are all united in their vision of a country going backwards and dumping the party system that works mostly well except here and running the country as a group of independents “like the old days”. It would be run like a committee, they said.

When I die and some “body” comes up to me and says, “Welcome, Colin, we want you to serve on a committee,” I know I am in Hell!

The point they have all missed is that there is nothing wrong with a party – it is how it is run. Just because you are now a committee doesn’t change that basic premise.

If you have someone like ex-premier McKeeva Bush at the head of a committee do you think that would be any different?

At least in the “old days” we knew whom the independents would align themselves with. We don’t know with this bunch.

And what did we hear from all seven of them on Monday?

What plans for changing things were announced?

What stimulating and fresh ideas did we receive?

What did they say that made me shout “hooray”?

Was my belly alight with fire after I had heard all of them?

The answer my friends was a big fat NO!

I was even angry with myself for being so unimpressed and I was angry at them for wasting their big chance of presenting something that would energise me like I was on that very first C4C meeting last year.

What we got was another bash at the UDP and the PPM Progressives, the minority government members and, of course, DART.

Now they had had enough time to have read and digested the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Review and shown to us how they would have sat down with DART and negotiated the deal with him, remembering that our country is broke and we needed him. He is almost the only investor we have got. Anyone else would have gone by now with all this corruption and negative publicity.

When the C4C candidates had finished gyrating not very well to the lively music, shaking hands with their fellow endorsees and trying, sometimes with limited success, to remember their names, we got to actually hear what they had to say. The whole purpose of why people had gathered in West Bay and why I was giving up “Dancing With the Stars” was to listen to them on television.

We got nothing. They told us nothing new. They even raked up eight year old mistakes so as to make sure we knew the PPM were tarred with the same brush as the UDP without telling us how they would have done things differently.

With DART they had a golden opportunity to take some of the advice given in the PwC review, put a slightly different spin on it, and made it there own. But they didn’t. They never told us how, when the country is broke, how they would negotiate with an investor. How they would even attract someone. If I was such an investor after listening to all of them I would have turned around and gone.

YOU HAVE TO GIVE TO GET INVESTMENT MAKING SURE YOU WILL GET SOMETHING BACK AND HOPEFULLY MORE.

Our country cannot incur more debt. For heaven’s sake some of these people are accountants!

It’s no use saying when you put us there in the LA we will get things done and everyone will benefit. We are clever people.

One of the speakers even had a go at a “professional politician”. We don’t want “professional politicians” was actually said. So we want a bunch of amateurs?

It was with much despair I went thankfully to bed and I didn’t have to worry what my Editorial subject was going to be.

Aren’t you just as unimpressed as I am?