I hope you all read The Honourable McKeeva Bush, OBE, JP Premier and Minister of Finance Tourism and Development’s complete and unabridged Reply To Budget Motion Debate 2012, we featured on the iNews Cayman front page over the weekend. If you haven’t, please do. There is nothing boring anywhere. Unfortunately, not all for the right reasons.

I have asked and almost cried in two past Editorials how badly WE NEED A LEADER WHO IS A STATESMAN. There is no doubt that no matter how much you dislike, hate, use every expletive against him, Mr. Bush is a leader. There is nobody in the legislative Assembly (LA) who can hold a candle to his leadership.

There is also no doubt that Mr. Bush has not learnt the first crumbs of how to be a statesman. I have no doubt he doesn’t want to be a statesman. He may not know what a statesman is.

There are many definitions in all the dictionaries and they all contain one word or words meaning the same.

That one word is “wisdom”.

A summary of the generally accepted meaning of a statesman is:

1. a political leader whose wisdom, integrity, etc, win great respect
2. a person active and influential in the formulation of high government policy, such as a cabinet member
3. a politician

Has our premier the qualities of #1? With the greatest respect to his position as the Cayman Islands premier, and with all his Parliamentary experience, as he has pointed out to me in the LA when he blasted one of my editorials, the answer has to be “NO”.

After three years in office you cannot continue blaming the Island’s woes on the past PPM government. It does not wash well anymore. The UDP, under Mr. Bush’s leadership, was put in place by the majority of Cayman’s voting public to put the problems they left right.  He can’t say he didn’t know about the problems. He campaigned heavily along with his other UDP candidates he would FIX IT. He knew what the problems were. He berated the PPM government in the LA continuously when he was on the backbench.

His opening statement, “Every new government hopes to be handed a fish when they take over” is incredulous. If it was a delicious fish the previous government was holding they would have still been in power. You don’t get elected holding a fish. You get elected because in your own words, they were holding “a snake” and they handed it to you.

You say you asked them for “bread” and they gave you “a stone”. What on earth were you expecting? A lovely bunch of coconuts? Didn’t you notice when you took office there were “unfinished schools and other over-ambitious projects”?

Mr. Bush, they are still unfinished THREE YEARS later. Your watch. Your problem.

The fact that “your hard work over the last three years, the turn-around we’ve accomplished, should have been enough” is NOT enough.

You spend so much time crying and shouting at the PPM’s inadequacies, forgetting conveniently that a proportion of their problems were due to the downturn in the WORLD economy, mainly because of the woeful and almost criminal mismanagement and greediness by the major banks, you put the whole blame on them. I have to inform you, the PPM government did NOT cause the present world recession!

I can agree with you that we do NOT want taxation and I would stand shoulder to shoulder with you on that one, although as the One Man, One Vote (OMOV) campaigners have decided, you also may not want me that close!

A statesman needs to unify the country in these precarious times. A statesman needs an opposition to work with them in these precarious times. A statesman needs the mother country to know there is a leader in place who will obey its rules.

The statesmanlike leader is there to negotiate, to placate, and to show he has WISDOM when he speaks his words.

The Conservative/Liberal Democrat/coalition UK government is a much easier bird to deal with than the previous Socialist one was the PPM had to ‘negotiate’ with. ‘Tax- haven’ is not a word they use in a nice way in their vocabulary.

Do you really think using descriptive phrases such as tarring and feathering the opposition for what it did three years ago, saying they “turn the debates to as poisonous a pitch possible, to pit every man against his brother, to besmirch and blacken these Islands’ name locally and internationally, so that if people outside were really to listen to that crew, no one would consider coming to visit or invest here” is going to win them over?

The opposition is not perfect and the media in its reporting has shown this. The media also has to report the government frailties and its failure to get the country back on a firm footing. It’s not a one way street, Mr. Bush. And when you bash the media with “and they have people who help them, and call it good reporting”, it would be bad reporting if we said everything is rosy when it most definitely is not.

I can put my hand on my heart and say iNews has NEVER taken a side one way or another and slanted it that way in any of our reports and even my Editorials. My Editorials are MY opinions and they are intended to be debated and I do NOT take offence or blast anyone, nor refuse to publish them, if they disagree with me. Not one person who disagrees with me is my enemy. A lot of my own family are UDP members and/or supporters whilst others are for the PPM. We all have an opinion.

You make a wonderful statement, Mr. Bush, “if I have the opportunity to lead another government – it will be one where every member of the House will sit around the table in the Government Administration Building and have a hand in the policies and the things that need to be done in these Islands.” And, “Every MLA will then have to accept their share of accountability, no matter their party affiliation.”

It’s not too late to implement it now. A good start would be to allow a majority of the votes cast who say “Yes” to the OMOV campaign to be granted and make it therefore FAIR so the persons who say “No” have to vote! Parties here who win elections win by the slimmest of majorities – 1!

Then we have the mud slinging from you using names eg. “crab-in-a-barrel antics”, “hit men in the Audit office carrying on their partiality and rascality”, “Ezzard and his porn show”, and these are only ones the premier uses in his formal documented speech.

In the LA Mr. Bush became animated, diverted himself from the documented speech, and with much passion yelled and screamed across the floor at the opposition benches. He accused the opposition of enjoying the problems this bureaucracy was causing saying, “they are using that to be gleeful and sitting down eating carrots and drinking milk!”

The British were being “unrealistic” when they expected a small jurisdiction like Cayman to follow “some UN ideals” or World Bank standards. This was due to the pressure the Foreign and Commonwealth office (FCO) were placing on him.

He accused the Auditor General, Alastair Swarbrick, of being “palsywalsy” with the opposition, CNS, and particularly offensive, “brown nosing” with the governor and the FCO. Mr Bush the Auditor General is paid to do this – it is his job!

The premier is undaunted by the FCO’s refusal to rubber stamp his port project with China Harbour and is steaming ahead saying it was the best partner and announcing three Caymanian companies would be involved, McAlpine, DECCO (Dart’s construction company) and Hurlstone. He also said “to ensure effective management and timely delivery in this project, we have employed a highly experienced local Project Manager.” We understand, although not confirmed, the Project Manager is Alastair Paterson, who is indeed highly qualified and has been resident on these islands for over 30 years.

“I am not going to back down,” Mr. Bush said. “They [the FCO] will not stop it.” He said November would be the start date. “There will be a thousand people employed on that dock when it is in full swing and the vast majority of them will be Caymanian,” he added.

The China Company has come under fire, especially from Jamaica, for corruption. His response:

“The whole world was dealing with China. What? So you gonna believe these donkey faced people who talk about corruption! They are some of the ugliest people in the world!”

As I said, Mr. Bush has a LOT to learn about being a statesman.