Do not be fooled by the distractions of the Dems!
That was the warning meted out to hundreds of Barbados Labour Party (BLP) supporters yesterday, at their 79th annual conference in Queen’s Park, The City, by former government minister Liz Thompson.
With the next general election constitutionally due next year, she urged party supporters not to be distracted by the Freundel Stuart administration.
“The Barbados we know is gone. This is what Freundel Stuart and the Democratic Labour Party has reduced us to, and the Barbados Labour Party is here to say ‘all aboard’ because the country has suffered enough and cannot take anymore.
“The Barbados Labour Party is here because the poor and the working class have been emasculated; women have been pauperised, men have been dehumanised, the working class has been obliterated, the middle class has been decimated, Bajans are frustrated, and the business sector has been eviscerated. The country is being deracinated, pulled down from its very root; everything in this society and economy gone,” she declared.
With tears rolling down her cheeks, she spoke of meeting a young man in Worrell’s bread shop in Eagle Hall, St Michael, who asked her to pray for him because he had been without a job for two years and was spending his last money to buy bread for his family.
She also referred to an old woman with a stick having to carry water, a young woman who could not bathe daily, an elderly man who could not afford his medication, and people who visited the supermarkets continuously having to figure out how to stretch their dollars as examples of what the country was becoming.
“We did not understand last election that when he woke up from his slumber and started talking, [the Prime Minister] was not talking to protect your jobs; he was talking to protect his own job and those of his colleagues. But the time is over Stuart; all aboard we are coming for you. And we are not coming for you in our own name; we are coming for you in the names of the people of this country; the people in here, the people out there, the people in your constituency . . . . From the heights and the terraces, to the gaps and the gullies, we are coming,” she said to thunderous applause.
She stressed that the people of Barbados needed a change of Government.
“We had our 50th anniversary of Independence last year. You would have thought that this was an opportunity to articulate a new way forward, to give us a new policy platform to carry the country for another 50 years, to identify the social problems and to say ‘these are the solutions’, to have a national dialogue and conversation to involve citizens in talking about and determining what their future will be. Instead, we got fete, we got party, and we got a monument at the Garrison.
“Make no mistake the campaign has started . . . . This is going to be an election of rumour and salacious gossip. Where ever the Dems go now, they tell you don’t vote for the BLP. This is going to be an election of distractions and red herrings,” she said. (RA)