With Crop Over over, electoral politics in Barbados will now occupy centre stage. It is a time when internal party discipline should be at its tightest, with no room for breaking ranks or signs of confusion.
It must therefore be troubling for the engine room of the Democratic Labour Party that in such a period, the recent public comments from leading members of Government make it difficult to identify a central line of march or whether there is an authority figure sufficiently magnetic to unify the lagging, weaker, less experienced elements of the outer ring of leadership.
The gravity, therefore, of the signs of internal stumbling in a moment such as this cannot be underestimated.
Unfortunately, key members of Cabinet have recently made bold statements on Government and party policy [that were] at variance with apparent official policy, which can have a direct impact on the DLP’s chances for re-election.
Most glaring of these has been the Attorney General’s expression of his personal disagreement with his Government’s policy of using National Insurance funds to support the Four Seasons project. Given the sensitivity of the issue, it was an unbelievably fragile limb upon which to perch.
What is more, his Four Season’s folly soon gave way to farce with his comments on Government’s decision not to reinstate the practice of tax-free allowances.
Ignoring the Government’s accepted advice from a retired Inland Revenue official on the illegality of tax-free allowances, the Attorney General indicated his preference for the old practice.
There was an apparent method to his madness, since he attempted to paint the Minister of Finance as a highly principled and responsible economic manager for placing country above party by continuing the unpopular tax on allowances despite the political cost.
Following the Attorney General, Minister of Social Transformation Steven Blackett appeared to be buckling under the weight of public criticism with his suggestion that many of his Government’s manifesto promises were unattainable. He blamed his Government for not admitting this earlier.
Without realizing it, the minister might have tacitly endorsed the Opposition’s claim that the DLP’s manifesto had been an “election gimmick”.
In short, those mixed messages indicate a party under pressure and paint a picture of internal confusion.
As the election nears, DLP planners need to ensure that the politically inexperienced candidates are, like Mitt Romney, shielded from public exposure. The central leadership also needs to assert itself and bury the contradictory policy positions being carelessly expressed by the periphery.
However, given that many of the elected members genuinely believe their public interventions are helping the party’s cause, as well as the reluctance of the leadership to rein in the neophyte mavericks, it is expected that the current trend will continue and add yet another distraction to the DLP’s bid for re-election.
• Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, specializing in regional affairs. Email tjoe2008@live.com