Trinidad and Tobago falls deeper into political crisis by the hour. The government could no longer command a majority in parliament. The opposition was certain to win a vote of no confidence. The president could then have invited the opposition leader to form a government. He could have done so, because three government ministers assured him of their support.

But the prime minister and his minority defied every parliamentary procedure. Twice, just as the motion leading to a vote of no confidence was to be put, a member of the ruling party, in a pre-arranged move, got up, caught the Speaker's eye and asked for the sitting to be adjourned. The ruling party has now called a general election, though technically it has no power to do so.

The basis of Trinidad's economy is natural gas; BP Amoco discovered the largest gas field in the western hemisphere. There is also enormous revenue - nearly all this energy goes to the US - from the nationalised extraction and refining of oil. The refinery has just been upgraded and compares with oil production facilities anywhere in the world. There is a sugar industry in which thousands work, from planting sugar cane and reaping it to refining sugar, both for home consumption and export. And at the end of this process there is rum, glorious rum.

Trinidad has four daily newspapers, an equal number of weeklies, five radio stations, two local television stations and public satellite TV. Every child goes to school; electricity, gas and water run throughout the island. There is no distinction between rural and urban. Every single society of Trinidad and Tobago has been urbanised.

So the population of 1.3 million, cramped on these small twin islands, is slap bang in the middle of the modern world. Yet the people are held back, disrupted, thrown into confusion by the most corrupt, bankrupt, thieving government. They are a 21st-century people trapped in an 18th-century structure of government. It can't last, it won't last.

Parliamentary seats are bought and sold by the ruling party. Its leaders bus people to political meetings and pay them; they are currently paying people to picket meetings of their opponents. They mug the treasury for personal gain. In most cases, these are middle-class men with little experience of political struggle and no experience at all of big industry.

The government passes laws to keep the people at heel: laws that allow it to hang 12-15 citizens in a couple of days; laws to give magistrates the power to sentence 17-year-olds to ten years in prison for snatching a cheap necklace from some passer-by. Because they bear no relation to the main pillars of society, they have to go around with their chests puffed up in order to be noticed. And so they have turned into the most murderous aristocrats, and stamp on anything that is creative.

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