Opposition leader has knocked Prime Minister Freundel Stuart saying he is “holding onto power”, rather than seeking the will of the people.
Arthur, a former Prime Minister, was speaking to thousands of people gathered at Heroes Square for a Barbados Labour Party (BLP) mass meeting last night.
“A Prime Minister has awesome power in a democracy such as ours since it is left to the Prime Minister the conditions under which an election must be called. No ‘real real’ prime minister will seek to take any advantage of any little loophole in the law or any nuance in the constitution. A ‘real real’ prime minister will always seek to find out what is the will of the people because our democracy is based on the will of the people,” Arthur argued.
He said when voters go to the polls to select a government they typically do so with the expectation that that government will serve for five years at the most, “and after five years or before that it will come back to you and ask for a mandate so that it can govern on the basis of the will of the people”.
He said every prime minister of Barbados since Independence has governed and exercised the sole discretion to call elections without seeking to take any advantage of any loopholes in the law.
“Barrow did, we never heard of a government staying in office for more than five years under Errol Barrow. Tom Adams did it – called elections in good time so that the will of the people could be discerned, Bernard St John did it, Erskine Sandiford did it and I did it three times too.”
Full reports in tomorrow’s SUNDAY SUN
