Campaign promises

Taxi drivers are getting a fare increase, and Politics.bm has already weighed in on whether this is an election ploy, so I won't discuss that here.

Anyway, the Premier has announced some upcoming goals of Government which sounds nice on paper but I'm skeptical. After all, these announcements were not made at a session of Parliament. In fact these never even came up in any previous forum, rather it was at the party's conference. So I can only treat it as an election promise made to (a) galvanise support of the party faithful and (b) set up a election manifesto of sorts to the public.

Something that doesn't sit right with me is the announcement that the prison population here is at its lowest level in a decade and Government's taking credit for it. When I read in the newspapers of people getting convicted for all these crimes and only receiving the obscure "suspended sentence" punishments from the courts, something doesn't seem right. We ought to be locking more people up, or at least putting them into these "alternatives to incarceration" programmes, right? It's somewhat confusing, to say the least.