Out of line and totally wrong! That’s how retired educator Jeff Broomes feels about some comments made by Member of Parliament Kerrie Symmonds last Sunday on the platform of a Barbados labour Party mass meeting in Checker Hall, St Lucy.
While delivering this week’s lunchtime lecture at the Democratic Labour Party headquarters, he said he was very disappointed in Symmonds and totally rubbished the comments.
“Kerrie, I did not like when you insulted three ladies of the BLP when you called them 1 000 pounds of blubber. I did not like when you disrespected an outstanding son of the soil, Sir Harold St John and I absolutely do not like what you did in your classless caricature of our sitting Prime Minister,” he said.
Broomes advised Symmonds that he could disagree with something without being disrespectful and disagreeable and called on Symmonds, an attorney at law, to make a public apology to the Prime Minister.
“You do not have to like the individual but you must, yes must, as a potential leader of this country, respect the office, not only his but the one you hold, as well as that which you are now seeking. I am calling on you, Kerrie Symmonds,to immediately make a public apology to Prime Minister, the Hon Fruendel Stuart, or forever hang your head in shame.
“You are one of our leaders thatwe expect to be respected by our youth,” Broomes said.
The former principal stressed that perhaps the politicians of today should take a leaf out of the book of former Prime Minister Errol Barrow.
“. . . He lived a life of respect and so should we. We all knew he and Sir Grantley Adams were bitter political foes but, as someone who grew up in the Bow Road, I was frequently excited to see him drive into Tyrol Cot to have an afternoon siesta with someone that he obviously saw as one deserving of respect. He would never have been so despicable in his public displays as to call anyone, far less a Prime Minister, what a senior member did last week. Mr Kerrie Symmonds, you disappointed me, you have projected the antithesis of our national hero,” he added.
Broomes added that today the island reeked of polarisation at present and persons should seek to emulate Barrow’s value systems.
“Errol Walton Barrow’s Barbados promoted the notion of family where we could disagree without being disagreeable. My final advice is that we must respect the values and the vision of our nation hero by shapingour country as an oyster where we have our internal disagreements, because we are not clones, but have uncompromising core values thatserve as the strong collective outer shell in protection of who and what we are as a people,” he added. (DB)
