It is the content of your character and not your social standing that is important and will determine your path in life.
This message was the core of what Opposition Leader Owen Arthur told those who gathered at College Savannah, St John last night.
In a speech that was personal in many respects, Arthur says he has instilled this in his two daughters Leah who will be sitting the Common Entrance Examination this year and Sabrina, who has represented Barbados in table tennis and is soon to be married.
Arthur said he has urged his daughters to make their own way in life, carving out their own niche.
“It is the content of character rather than if your father is an aristocrat,” he said, that should be the guide.
“I say to you it would be an act of backwardness if we go back to the days when we vote for people based on where they come from,” he said, stressing there are to be no ‘kingmakers’ or ‘queenmakers’ in Barbados.
Arthur said if the Barbados Labour Party was to bring a candidate on a platform and ask the people to vote for them because they are a “queen” they would be criticized for it.
“The BLP cannot do most of the things the DLP are doing” he said.
“It is not about where somebody was born, it is the insolence that we have to accept that someone is presented to us based on who her father was…” he added.
Arthur said that it was a person’s democratic right if they wanted to vote for Mara Thompson, the DLP candidate, but he said it was offensive that she was presented as a queen.
The BLP leader also appealed to St John residents to find it in their hearts to support their candidate Hudson Griffith.
He said the party needed someone to stay in that constituency and give the people of St John the sterling representation that does not depend on whether they vote for the candidate or not.
He appealed to Griffith to give the assurance that he will be there for the people of St John.
