OPPOSITION BARBADOS LABOUR PARTY (BLP) LEADER Owen Arthur last night told a massive crowd at the St George Secondary School that the worst of the impasse between him and his predecessor Mia Mottley was now behind them.
Speaking after engineer Dwight Sutherland had won the nomination to represent the party in St George South in the next general election, Arthur said the last six months had been the most difficult of his 27 years in politics. He said he had to deal with a BLP that faced its greatest crisis in its 73 years and there might have even been the danger the party could have been split asunder.
Almost on cue Mottley arrived as he spoke and was mobbed by sections of the crowd that conservatively numbered about 1 100, packing the school hall and spilling out onto the grounds. Arthur acknowledged Mottley’s arrival and urged her to come forward.
“Whatever divisions that we might have had, the worst is now behind us. We will heal our wounds and we will bind up ourselves to go forward united towards victory,” he said.
Yesterday an earlier meeting between the two reported by parliamentary colleague Rawle Eastmond to be scheduled for 11 a.m. did not materialize. Mottley only returned to the island yesterday afternoon.
Arthur beseeched the Barbadian electorate to let 2008 be the last occasion that they voted for “foolishness”.
He said the Democratic Labour Party Government had taken a Barbados that was once viewed as a “model” in the region and turned it into a “muddle”.
The St Peter MP said that “week after week” and “action after action” Government was negating the progress made in the country through its “chaos, confusion, inertia and lack of leadership”.
“Our country has been overtaken by a group of serial blunderers,” he charged, adding that Freundel Stuart appeared to be a “ceremonial Prime Minister”.
He said Barbadians were suffering, but Stuart was offering no leadership. He added that initiatives to ease the high cost of living such as reducing the excise tax on gasolene and having regional governments remove the common external tariff on goods – within the scope of the CARICOM agreement – were not being pursued.
He said Stuart was not offering leadership on the CLICO issue which he noted was the major obstacle to Barbados’ stability.
Arthur said he sensed a march to victory and stressed the BLP would not offer people “trivia of trickery” to win their support.
Earlier a whopping 734 people cast their ballots with Sutherland gaining 523 votes, schoolteacher Pastor Dr Beverley Lashley 204. There were seven spoilt votes.
