THINGS ARE GETTING TOO TINGSY IN NASSAU

Chairman of the PLP cautions voters about devaluing their vote in a voice note on Boxing Day 26 December 2025:

All my political life I’ve tried to preach about values. Let me give you one example. A very rich man, multi multi-millionaire treated me to lunch one day in Nassau. There was just the two of us at the restaurant. 

The bill for the lunch came back and the price was $250. He paid it, but he said to me that the lunch wasn’t worth $250, and I thought it a curious comment because he was worth multi hundreds of millions, but still had a sense of what the value of his money was. Voters and electors have value. They have a vote that is a valuable thing. 

There are lessons to be we learned about this in this country. And there are laws put in place by political leaders, our political leaders to ensure, for example, there’s a secret ballot. This was to stop the practice of bag of flour politics, as described by HM Taylor in the age of open voting when you got 5 pounds of flour before you voted, then you declared for the candidate, and then he gave you another five pounds after you declared. So you actually concluded the end of the bargain. That has stopped, and there are prohibitions since then, to stop importuning and solicitation, by the use of money for votes and other inducements. There are laws against bribery as well. 

But you can put any law in place that you like, nothing can protect against a voter or elector who chooses to devalue the vote. Exchanging his vote or her vote for what is being called in the vernacular these days, being “tingsy”.  When it gets to that and someone is elected on the basis of elections for being “tingsy”, then there can be no complaint after the person who gets elected simply goes out and does whatever the heck he wants, without any regard to a voter or in the general good or in the particular good.

So one of the reasons I chose, for example, to go to the schools to distribute the general largesse for children is because it is a controlled environment where teachers are there. And the teachers can instill values like order obedience, gratefulness, loyalty, the teachers can instill values of how to think of other persons and not just of yourself, that is the value and the ideal of Christmas: to think of others first, of the needy; to appreciate that, we should not be so self-absorbed that everything is about me, me, me. That remains the old religion. It was good enough for Lilla and Fred Sr and it’s good enough for me. 

Our children should learn that there is nothing in this life that’s free. There is a benefit and there’s a burden. The late Elwood Donaldson used to say a fair exchange is no robbery. 

MPs have their roles, but citizens have their roles as well. One of them is not to demean and devalue their vote.