Feb 27 – GSD: Chief Minister “In A Tangle Over Fishing”
The GSD has said that the Chief Minister’s reaction to its recent press release on fishing is “just another attempt to divert attention.”
The Chief Minister, says the GSD, claims that the GSLP/Liberals complied with their manifesto commitment by tearing up the 1999 Fishing Agreement. The GSD says it accepts that the Government tore up the Fishing Agreement via an announcement on Facebook by Minister John Cortes in what was described as “a Rookie error” by the Chamber of Commerce. That Rookie error, says the Opposition, “plunged us into a huge crisis for no gain.” Be that as it may, argues the GSD, the Government has “utterly failed to keep to its clear and express manifesto pledge to stop illegal fishing with nets ‘immediately’”.
For most people, says the GSD, the normal use of the word “immediate” means just that. It is not necessary, according to the Oppositon, to consult the 20-Volume Oxford English Dictionary to arrive at a definition of “immediate”: Should the Chief Minister need to do so, however, the party jokes that he would find that “immediate” is defined as: “occurring or done at once” or “instant, instantaneous, prompt, swift, speedy, rapid, quick, expeditious”.
For the Chief Minister to claim, after almost three-and-a-half years in office, that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” in order to justify his abject failure to keep to his promise is “a lame excuse indeed” says the Opposition.
It is also unseemly, says the GSD, for the Government to continue to blame the RGP for lack of enforcement when the GSLP/Liberals in their manifesto said “we do not believe it is right to allow illegal fishing … we will stop this immediately” without any reference to the exercise of discretion by the RGP on enforcement.
Further, adds the party, the use of the analogy that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” is “most unfortunate”. A more appropriate description of the situation, according to the GSD, is that the Chief Minister “continues to fiddle with excuses while Rome burns because the reality is that unlike in Rome the rule of law simply does not appear to rule in our waters.”
A statement concluded: “It appears that the law is only to be enforced against locals.”
