Well, you heard and saw them on your television sets – all 30 of them. And there they were – attacking and belittling each other, posturing for the television cameras and making all sorts of exaggerated claims for themselves and against their opponents.
Can Barbadians afford to continue with this divisive Westminster-style two-party system of politics, with its insistence on opposition for the sake of opposition?
The PEP firmly believes that this system of politics has outlived its usefulness to Barbados. In its earlier days, it was a useful system in that it helped our Barbadian population to internalize the workings and principles of democratic governance, and to work out for themselves a national socio-political consensus of social democracy.
But, having already delivered all the positives that it is capable of delivering, it has now become obsolete, and is doing damage to our nation.
Barbados is on the decline, and what Barbados now desperately needs is a government of national unity that permits leadership talent from beyond the narrow confines of the Democratic Labour Party/Barbados Labour Party nexus to play a role, and that enables the people to be more involved in decision-making and in holding the political leadership accountable.
Last week’s Budget must be adjudged a relative failure, in that it failed to come to terms with the fundamental criteria of a programme that is designed to extricate Barbados from its current recession.
The PEP has put forward a six-point blueprint for extricating Barbados from recession. This blueprint begins with measures to re-establish the soundness of the finances of the Government, and we have warned that our Government cannot persist with such an imbalance in its finances that it finds itself having to borrow revenue from the National Insurance Fund on a monthly basis to pay the salaries of civil servants.
The Budget failed to address this deficiency.
It also failed to come up to the mark on four of the other five critical measures for lifting Barbados out of recession – restoration of the purchasing power of the masses of people; re-energizing production in agriculture, manufacturing, tourism and construction; engineering a new social contract based on a greater degree of fairness and burden sharing; and provision of short term employment through grant or project funded environmental works programmes.
But we can still discern a kernel of worth in the Budget – unlike the vast majority of election year Budgets, it does not provide for extravagant and reckless Government spending. Mr Stuart has not taken the road that Prime Minister Erskine (now Sir Lloyd) Sandiford took in 1990 when he purchased his election victory with extravagant Government spending and in the process damaged the economy.
And so, the PEP is not proposing the destruction or total abandonment of the two traditional parties, for if you look hard enough you can still find something of value in each of them. But what we are saying is that they, and the system that they constitute, are now dysfunctional and counterproductive, and that Barbadians must now resolve to move forward by working out a national strategy for attaining a government of national unity.
The first step in moving towards a government of national unity is for the PEP and other entities to put forward a Peoples Team of at least ten candidates that Barbadians will support, and thereby ensure that neither the DLP nor BLP wins an outright majority in the next general election.
The PEP column represents the views of the People’s Empowerment Party. Email [email protected]
