Introduction

• Author: Hamid A. Ghany
• Profession: Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine
• Pages: 7-31

Introduction

...(I)t is widely supposed that British policy, if it has ever had any long

term aims at all, has throughout the centuries of imperial rule – “the

Commonwealth experience” – been at pains to establish, even to impose,

in the dependencies of the Crown, a Westminster model, irrespective of

local wish or circumstance: that the Mother of Parliaments was concerned

to spawn a brood of little Westminsters and to export them to the colonies.

Though this is the common currency of contemporary British politicians,

and of British schoolmasters, it seems on investigation to be substantially

quite untrue.1

This quotation summarizes the essence of the creation of the

constitutional systems of government in the Commonwealth Caribbean.

While A.F. Madden devotes the thrust of his article to disproving the thesis

that the British government ever had any intention of establishing the

Westminster model overseas, he fails to address the reality of what was

erected for the ex-colonies at their independence by Britain.

On closer examination, it appears that a completely unique system of

government was introduced. The identification and description of that

unique system of government and the legislative institutions that were

created and subsequently retained disprove the theory of the transfer

of the Westminster model to the Commonwealth Caribbean. Indeed, it

confirms the existence of an evolved system of government whose roots

can be traced to the British imperial dominance of what was once called

the ‘British West Indies’.

The independent territories of the Commonwealth Caribbean and their

years of independence, at the time of writing, are as follows:

Jamaica (1962); Trinidad and Tobago (1962); Guyana (1966); Barbados

(1966); the Bahamas (1973); Grenada (1974); Dominica (1978); St Lucia

(1979); St Vincent and the Grenadines (1979); Antigua and Barbuda

(1981); Belize (1981); and St Kitts and Nevis (1983).

The Whitehall Model

The Whitehall model represents the systems of government that were

established in the Commonwealth Caribbean after various territories

Constitutional Development in the Commonwealth Caribbean

viii

gained independence from Great Britain. While the title was given to these

systems of government by Leslie Wolf-Phillips,2 the structure was further

researched by the author for his doctoral dissertation at the London School

of Economics and Political Science.3

There are essentially five major tenets of the Whitehall model that best

describe its core characteristics:

(1) the inclusion of a Bill of Rights in the Constitution; (2) a unique

bicameral system in eight of the 12 independent countries; (3) a more rigid

enforcement of the separation of powers that pre-dated the Westminster

alterations of 1999–2009; (4) the written interpretation of many unwritten

Westminster constitutional conventions that pre-dated the reforms of

1999–2011; and (5) the entrenchment of constitutional provisions.

These characteristics have undergone some changes between 1987,

when they were first articulated, and today in their revised format. The

separation of powers in the United Kingdom (UK) under the Westminster

model has come closer to what exists in the Commonwealth Caribbean by

virtue of the reforms to the position of lord chancellor in 2005, undertaken

in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005,4 while the introduction of the UK

Supreme Court in 2009, based on part 3 of the provisions of the said

Constitutional Reform Act 2005, has removed from the House of Lords the

dual role of being a legislative body as well as a court. The final separation

of the UK Supreme Court and the House of Lords came on October 1,

2009, and ushered in a new era for the Westminster model that would

make it more akin to the Whitehall model, with the separation of powers,

that had existed in the Commonwealth Caribbean since the arrival of

independence. The only overlap between the branches of government

is now to be found in the requirement for a parliamentary system of

government whereby the executive branch is drawn from the legislature.

Another area of change lies in the abolition of the power of dissolution of

Parliament in the Westminster model in the UK by virtue of the provisions

of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011.5 This has removed one of the more

significant constitutional conventions by which the Westminster system of

government in the UK had operated and placed it in the domain of statutes

subject to further amendment at a future date. The correlation with the

Commonwealth Caribbean lay with the issue of dual interpretations of the

prior convention in the UK whereby it had been felt, on the one hand,

that the dissolution of Parliament was done on a compliant basis by the

monarch at the request of the prime minister, while, on the other hand,

there was another school of thought that argued that the monarch had a