As Shakespeare PUT?IT, “when the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won”, on Friday morning when Barbadians awake thanking God for sparing their lives to welcome another day in our island paradise, the multitude of serious problems facing us as a nation and individuals will not have miraculously disappeared in the halo of the result of the St John by-election.
My previously stated waning interest in Barbadian politics reached its nadir during the current campaign when both parties floundered by wasting what logically were excellent opportunities to focus on national issues, falling prey to irrelevancies and trivialities, deepening national cynicism, and further promoting the thinking that politically we seem not to be rising.
When issues should dominate platforms, we are bombarded with vitriolic, personal polemics about who is a rodent, who are vagabonds, who cannot like anybody else because of self-dislike, the importance of where somebody was born, who eat roast breadfruit, why and where and more that is unedifying and does not help Barbadians find solutions to myriad problems causing restless nights.
After three years in office there must be more than free bus fares for schoolchildren, summer camps and Constituency Councils that the Government could crow about. What about initiatives to tackle the fiscal deficit, declining revenues and unemployment?
The cost of living was job number one, two and three. How are ravaged consumers being protected from rampant, rapacious capitalists seemingly exploiting every opportunity to increase the costs of goods and services?
The Minister of Finance’s supermarket experience with a bottle of mauby at a dramatically increased price was a riveting personal testimony. The follow-up by the Minister of Trade and Commerce of prime facie price-gouging by the merchant class is resonating powerfully with consumers feeling the pinch in their pockets. Spend more platform time highlighting other areas of price-gouging and proposed remedies rather than searing invective.
CLICO is under judicial management after much foot-dragging, but people in St John and across Barbados want precise information on what this means for their investments. The campaign provides the opportunity to hear what to expect.
We heard that a new Chief Justice would be in place from January 1. What has happened?
If the process has hit a bump in the road, tell the people, Mr Prime Minister.
I have no idea what mileage is gained being pictured eating roast breadfruit on a street corner or making some ad hominem comment about a dated, obscure legal matter. Too much has been made of the non-issue of nationality.
My friend from Lodge School days, now one of my personal physicians, Dr Hamilton Gill, a scion of the distinguished B.L. Barrow/Gill family of Massiah Street, ran for the Jamaica Labour Party in South East St Anne in 1976.
That was the heyday of Michael Manley and the People’s National Party and he lost. He was a popular country doctor asked by constituents and the JLP leadership to run. His Barbadian birth did not overshadow the right man, wrong party mantra.
In a delightful irony, on returning to Barbados he ran as an Independent in the parish of his birth and continued residence in 1994 losing his deposit.
That was also decades before the lotta long talk about freedom of movement for university graduates and mechanisms to enhance regional integration. Examples proliferate of the political class moving beyond their naval strings burial grounds to make contributions not only in the Caribbean but outside. West Indians have sat in the British Lords and Commons and held high office. In Canada, the Governor General was born in Haiti, Senator Anne Cools right here.
On a related issue, Bob Verdun described in Tuesday’s DAILY?NATION by Sir David Seale as “a highly respected former Canadian journalist”, made some alarming, contradictory statements in the same paper. For example, he says “Barbados has the best two-party political system in the world . . .”, but then says “it is a waste of the precious time and resources of the people of Barbados to have a contested by-election”.
Why? According to Mr Verdun, “particularly because the DLP candidate is the late Prime Minister’s widow and especially because the House of Assembly needs more women in its ranks . . .”. He goes on: “Mr Arthur would have raised the positive profile of the BLP in the other 29 constituencies if he had allowed Mara Thompson to win the seat by acclamation.”
What grotesquely convoluted thinking!
That’s not the Bajan way and does violence to the system he over-hypes. How could the Opposition Leader in the best two-party system abdicate his responsibility by not contesting the by-election allowing Mrs Thompson to win by acclamation?
To suggest the House needs more women in its ranks may be true, but belies a significant ignorance of the Parliaments and Cabinets between 1994 and 2008 which had an historic number of women when Mr Arthur was Prime Minister.
Mr Verdun, while I understand why you express certain political opinions and write on things Barbadian as the latest offshore Solomon, please marshal your facts and tighten your thought processes before coming again.
• Peter Simmons, a social scientist, is a former diplomat.
