By Gordon Barlow

Forty years ago I was working in Nassau for RoyWest (now Coutts) and watching my bosses help prepare Cayman to take Nassau’s place as the leading Caribbean tax-haven.

What a success it has been. All the air-conditioned offices and cars, all the diverse nationalities, all the native Caymanians with first world education... all those and more are evidence of how well the bankers’ plans worked out.

Ah well, all good things come to an end. Whether Cayman’s good times are over just yet is not certain; but at the very least they are on hold. Our prosperity is under serious attack. We have no prepared defence in place, and we may have too many enemies to cope with.

The world’s high-tax governments are apparently trying to close down our tax-haven. The swine-flu scare (whether natural or manufactured) might badly hurt our tourism numbers. Long-time government financial mismanagement and imprudence will hit everybody’s pockets for several years to come, whatever band-aid may be applied in the short-term.

Our latest enemy is a surge of street crime and burglary. It caught our authorities off guard. As with the attack on our tax-haven, we had no prepared defence in place. The surge shouldn’t have been a total surprise. After all, disrespect for the rule of law has been common for decades. It’s taken the small-brain delinquents this long to catch on to how profitable it can be, that’s all.

Crony-corruption is not new. It has allowed Cayman to become an important link in the drugs traffic between South and North America. Tolerance of licensed criminality is part of the heritage that society passes on to its youngsters as they grow into adults. It’s where they get their disrespect of authority.


Limited opportunities

Here’s a thing to bear in mind when judging young muggers and burglars: most of them would rather not be working the streets. That’s quite true, you know.

They aren’t desperate for money any more than the householders are who steal from their helpers, or the companies are who steal from their migrant workers, or the office workers are who steal time from their bosses by running personal businesses while on the bosses’ payroll. It’s just that the muggers and burglars have limited opportunities to do their work in comfort.

(Naturally I don’t mean ALL householders are thieves, or ALL companies, or ALL office workers. If I had meant ALL, I would have said ALL. Those hyper-sensitive souls out there who keep trying to catch me out in this sort of thing: give me a break.)

Cayman’s various criminal activities are a complex problem, and any solution must take the complexity into account. One short essay can’t hope to cover the topic. All I can do here is to make a start today, and resume the theme in future columns.

There are plenty of ideas on how to solve the problem – many of them impractical. Hire more policemen, and arm them; make prison less comfortable; make sentences longer; allow the police to be more brutal; allow householders to own guns and use them against burglars; scrap all human rights. Yeah, well.

There are plenty of explanations for the latest surge in crime, too. Bad parenting; disrespect for authority; poor education; modern music; foreign cultural influences; illegal immigrants; the decline of Christianity; a shortage of youth facilities. And so on and on.

Identifying the causes must come first. Only when that has been done will it make sense to devise a long-term solution. All the public explanations mentioned above are indeed factors, but they don’t tell the whole story.


$1,000 and a backpack

The essential root cause of the current bout of lawlessness is the longstanding disrespect for the rule of law in Cayman. This disrespect has grown with the Islands’ population and wealth. It has never been limited to young tearaways, and did not originate with them. However, it may have inspired them.

When a householder short-pays his or her migrant helper or gardener and gets away with it, that illustrates to the children of the household (and all their friends) that “the law” protects the strong and not the weak.

When the householder arranges for the migrant to be deported for asking too persistently for the back wages, it reinforces the message. Muggers and burglars often don’t move in the same social circles as deportation officials, but they understand the principle involved.

Disrespect for the law exists at all high levels of our society as well as at the lowest levels. Some members of the latter go out and mug strangers for a living; some members of the former stay in their offices and mug their sponsors for a more comfortable lifestyle. The principle’s the same, isn’t it?

So come on. Let’s not pretend that our rebellious youth invented crime in Cayman. Let their elders set a better example for them.

Also, let’s not hold it against our youth for being bored. Here’s an idea for our new rulers to consider: give all school-leavers a thousand bucks and a backpack, and ship them off to Europe for a year. The experience would prove to them that they could cope with life even where their birthright entitlement didn’t count.

When they came back – those who did come back – they would compete on truly equal terms with expats for local jobs. No glass ceilings for them. They would have found and dealt with enough challenges to last them a lifetime, without shooting anybody.

You can’t beat that for a deal.