WEST INDIES: Cabinet for Barbados

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As the new West Indies nation moves toward next March's election of a federal legislature and formation of its first government, the eleven main islands are gradually getting more freedom from Britain in local affairs. This week a big helping of self-government goes to Barbados, sugargrowing "little England" of the West Indies, where for 300 years a select "plantocracy" has run the British Commonwealth's third oldest Parliament (after Britain itself and Bermuda). Governor Sir Robert Arundell will hand over part of his remaining powers to Barbados' first Cabinet, bossed by Socialist Prirne Minister Sir Grantley Herbert Adams, 59.

Under the Cabinet system, the governor will still appoint members of the island's various boards, will still be responsible for external affairs and internal security. But Adams will be able to initiate legislation on his own, rather than in consultation with the governor, will get a measure of control over the police.

A stolid, dour lawyer, Adams reversed tradition by beginning as a moderate and moving to the left. On coming home from Oxford in 1925, he won his first seat in the legislature through the influence of a planter. But he was soon attacking the "dictatorship" of the landowners, and when Depression-struck sugar workers rioted in 1937, Adams was blamed by the governor for inciting the violence.

Through the war years, he organized his Barbados Labor Party and Workers' Union, in 1948, after suffrage had been broadened, took over the legislature (the party now holds 15 of 24 seats). In 1954 he got the title of Prime Minister, and last year he was knighted. He boasts that "the spirit of feudalism that ruled Barbados is as dead as Queen Anne." But with 230,000 people jammed onto an island 14 by 21 miles in size, Barbados is still among the poorer areas of the West Indies. Its best hope: relaxation of immigration bars by other islands once federation begins working. Adams will be among the top three men in the dominant Federal Labor Party, along with Jamaica's Norman Manley and Trinidad's Eric Williams. But he plans to stick to his local job. "If I went to the federal Parliament," he says, "I would be betraying Barbados."