SOME PRETTY SMELLY political blood was spilled last Sunday at the nomination meeting for a candidate of the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) to contest the next elections for the St Michael South Central constituency.
Faced with the ignominy of three successive losses in races against the Democratic Labour Party’s perennial MP Richard Sealy, eligible voters in the opposition party opted to select a younger, fresher face – and that of a woman to boot.
Marsha Caddle, the successful candidate,pulled such an upset over David Gill, the three-time loser, both at the meeting and subsequently on the airwaves during a call-in radio programme, that he resorted to accusing the party machinery of operating against him.
The accusations made by Gill can only be refuted by officials of the BLP who need to be transparent. The charges are of such a devious nature that they demand an answer by the party hierarchy. So far, only silence.
In the absence of any comment from the party chairman or general secretary, the question to be asked, is: “Was there a compelling case for the BLP to persist with Gill after his record of four losses and one win in five general elections since 1994?”
In those elections, he only won his second. The string of defeats which followed showed him garnering between a low of 1 934 votes in 2003 and a highof 1 967 in 2013. While the gross of his ballots never broke the 2 000-vote barrier except when he won in 1999, his opponent since 1999 has moved his votes upwardly from 1 333 in his first outing to numbers that have always exceeded 2 000 – 2 108, 2 231 and 2 308.
These amounts seem to suggest to impartial observers that Gill’s potential to win, even when there is a swing towards the BLP as there was in 2013, is not very auspicious. No wonder that the party looked beyond Gill, even if it was not done in the tidiest modus, or in the recommended manner, as the losing candidate has alleged.
Also, it should be noted that those BLP newcomers who entered the fray in 1994 and won with Gill, colleagues Wendell Callender, Rudolph Greenidge, Ishmael Roett and Rommel Marshall are now political history. Indeed, so too are some 1994 tenderfoot losers like Noel Lynch and Joe Edghill, both of whom won seats subsequently.
Hamilton Lashley, who first ran and won on a DLP ticket in that poll, has since retired. Only newcomers Dennis Kellman and Freundel Stuart, then neophytes, but now with a string of victories, have stayed the course.
There are therefore lessons for Gill in both these numbers as well as these names.
