OPINION: No Plan B: Gaston Browne has No Shame

The unbridled hypocrisy on display in Gaston Browne’s self-published Facebook video “No Planet B” is enough to make one want to vomit and defecate at the same time.

This video, which the Prime Minister or someone acting on his behalf has posted to his official page, begins with a clip from one of his addresses where he says: “There’s no planet B. The consequences of climate change will be catastrophic. For some small island states, it already is.” A song then cuts in and over the song, we again hear Browne saying, “There is no Planet B,” adding, “We must fight unrelentingly to protect our planet and our civilisation,” before a climate change themed song takes over, with lyrics such as “Right now is where change must start. No planet B, nowhere to run, we stand as one, for every forest, for every sea, no profit is worth our destiny.”

Worse, he posted the video with the partial caption, “This is the embodiment of my climate advocacy during the past ten years.” Let us be clear. It is not. It is rather the embodiment of the environmental hypocrisy which has for so long characterised the behaviour of his government. Gaston Browne is not a climate justice warrior by any stretch of even a madman’s imagination. The most outrageous thing was suggesting that anything he has done resonates with the words “no profit is worth our destiny”. 

Gaston Browne’s administration has prioritised profit and its warped, unevolved 20th-century vision of “development” over sound development control polices and enforcement and sound environmental management practices consistently. This 1970s worldview, in which the salvation of a poor and developing tropical island nation is to be found in the promise of wealthy magnates who swallow up the shoreline and make decadent nests for the world’s elite, and where vegetation and wetlands are converted into lush golf courses, remains fundamental to Labour Party development philosophy. 

How many environmental controversies has this government found itself in? How many times has it demonstrated its contempt for both environmental advocates, scientific professionals, and ordinary citizens who mount any form of opposition to anything which the government deems necessary for development, necessary to create jobs, or necessary to move the nation forward? Barbuda gets the absolute worst of it. Gaston Browne, recycling the 50-year-old obsolete and dangerous development vision of the Bird era, envisions Barbuda as “another Jumby Bay” (his own words). In pursuit of that objective, the government rolls over for mega developers with plans that are clearly harmful to the coasts and ecosystems.

Anyone who opposes this ecocidal stupidity and calls instead for the government to work with developers to reduce the negative impact of planned projects is labelled an “economic terrorist” (the Prime Minister’s words)

In response to those who voiced opposition in 2015 to the Paradise Found and Callaloo Cay projects, the Prime Minister once decalred, “I also want to make it abundantly clear that those who may intend to become economic terrorists in this country, to block investment and retard the progress of the people of this country to keep our people unemployed, they would have to face the full extent of the law for any infractions whatsoever.”

That was 2015. This is 2025. Please do not be fooled by a nonsensical jingle on the Prime Minister’s Facebook page. Let his words speak for themself. His legacy on climate and environment over the last 10 years involves making overt threats to environmental advocates, consistently ignoring Antigua and Barbuda’s own environmental laws, granting approvals for developers to build in unsound ways, displaying a total contempt for the idea of retaining any shoreline vegetation whatsoever, having zero effective policy toward preserving inland forestry especially during land clearing, which is highly unregulated; and lax enforcement of fisheries laws and regulations.

In fact, the only thing he does is talk. Ever since Hurricane Irma in 2017, he has been darting around the world on the backs of the taxpayers of this country, presenting himself as some sort of messenger of a climate-doomed people, asking for money, when in fact, he does not have an environmentally conscious bone in his body. It is an embarrassment to watch this man on the world stage speaking about how we are victims of a climate crisis we did not create, when he is actively contributing to various localised environmental and climate-sensitive crises by the warped and idiotic polices of his decrepit and archaic government.

I swear this man is Lester Bird reborn. Same dead ideas. Same yestercentury vision for turning us into a giant luxury crypto stem cell casino. Same unethical and self-serving politics. Same mismanagement of lands. Same contempt for the environment. The only difference is that Lester Bird had more class. 

Richard B. Connery

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