The recently exposed racist slur used against Barbados’s elected prime minister Mia Mottley and one of her cabinet ministers, senator Lucille Moe, is both funny and tragic. Funny because the man who said it, Alexander Nix – former chief executive of the elections consultancy Cambridge Analytica – either forgot or was ignorant about who he was dealing with. His email to a colleague at Cambridge Analytica’s sister company, SCL Elections, spoke as much to his irritation that this tiny island nation dared rebuff his overtures to manage the now ruling Barbados Labour party’s election campaign as it did to his ugly prejudice. Funny because apart from the prime minister’s unquestionable political pedigree, Moe is, in her own right, a seasoned political campaign strategist with election victories all over the Caribbean under her belt. It would seem obvious to find out who you’re pitching to when attempting to fill your coffers using widely denounced strategies. But not to Nix. And here is where the tragic part comes in.

The Cambridge Analytica files: the story so far Read more

The Guardian’s investigation states that Nix and his now rebranded company are once again making overtures to Caribbean nations offering their services. Some will welcome him with open arms, but for others these alliances have not sat well with the countries they seek to charge exorbitant fees for their services. Caribbean-based consultants have been paid considerably less than SCL’s reported £15,000 monthly fee. The type of subversive gutter politics promoted by SCL and its ilk often leave a string of integrity-based questions in their wake. A more long-term consequence is that it perpetuates the view that small island politics is fundamentally corrupt, yet overseas consultants seem happy to ride those coat tails as long as they have their money.

Moe has earned her stripes creating election victories in Saint Kitts and Nevis (2015), Antigua (2004, 2014), the Cayman Islands (2017), Grenada (2018), Dominica (2014); Saint Lucia (2016) and Barbados (1994, 1999, 2003 and 2018). Caribbean politics is a brutal game and women get away with far less than men when they enter public life, making it difficult to attract female candidates. Moe, however, points to the example of Grenada, which she says has “the best gender balance in politics” of any country she has worked in. Keith Mitchell, the prime minister, should be applauded, she says. “In his cabinet he had 15 candidates, of which seven were women – and all of them won.”

Mottley, meanwhile, is a political juggernaut who has not stopped since her party won by a landslide in May. In less than a month she had reached out to Christine Lagarde of the IMF, designed and implemented a debt restructuring plan, addressed the United Nations on the critical issue of climate change and addressed the sewage problem on the island’s south coast that made international headlines and negatively affected Barbados’s tourism industry – all this while maintaining a record of integrity and transparency. It is an enviable record befitting a prodigious career that most men only dream of.

This must frustrate those of the old boys’ network who have been raised to believe that power resides with them. More than that, and with the national embarrassment that was the Windrush scandal still fresh in the public consciousness, it is clear that former colonies are still seen as places to plunder (either for their human or natural resources), but not given the respect of self-governing autonomous nations that have the right to say “no, thank you” when the likes of SCL Elections come knocking. The lack of due diligence speaks clearly to a flippant belief that the Caribbean as a region is a soft touch that will go googly-eyed over the prospect that “foreign is best” and roll out the red carpet. (SCL worked with the incumbents in the 2015 Saint Kitts general election and lost to the opposition coalition that Moe worked for.) That the snub came from black women must have been unbearable.

GCSE textbook condemned for racist Caribbean stereotypes Read more

The racial slur is disgusting – that is axiomatic. That it speaks to a continually complex and exploitative relationship between Britain and its former colonies is worrisome. That the old boys’ network still feels threatened by effortlessly powerful stateswomen such as Mottley has implications we’ve surely not seen the last of.

•