PRIME?MINISTER?Freundel Stuart says that now, more than ever, political parties and trade unions have an important role to play in the democratic process.
Stuart made this assertion on the 74th anniversary of the people’s uprising that led to riots in The City, sparked for the most part by the deportation of freedom fighter Clement Payne, now one of this country’s ten National Heroes.
At a wreath-laying ceremony at the bust of the revered Payne and the monument of other leaders of the time, Stuart said that political parties and the trade union had from time to time been in danger and were still in danger of being hijacked by the very elements “whom they were created to resist and to fight against”.
Stuart, the first leader to address the annual ceremony, said that the challenge facing political leaders and trade unions was to ensure that that did not happen.
The Prime Minister said that in other parts of the Caribbean, the political party grew out of the trade union while “in Barbados, depending on how you interpret it, the political party came first”.
“It is my settled conviction that while mass political parties and trade unions were the two most important institutions to come out of the 1930s, both have been under threat for some considerable time. There is a view that money rules the world and therefore that political parties of necessity have to align themselves with those persons or try to get the adoption of those persons who have the most money.
“That is not a view that I have ever shared. I have always known that ideas rule the world and that what political parties and the trade union have to do is to enter into a genuine engagement with the masses of the people about the crafting of a vertebrate future for the black people of this country Barbados and generally of the people of the Caribbean,” he said.
The Prime Minister placed his wreath first before an audience that included president of the Clement Payne Movement, David Comissiong, Pan Africanists Derek Murray, Trevor Prescod, Robert “Bobby”?Clarke and Reverend Gordon Matthews, along with entertainer Richard Stoute and new Junior Calypso Monarch, Sammi G.
The 14-year-old Sammi G, winner of the 13-18 category, placed a wreath and gave a rendition of Redemption Song.
Stuart praised Comissiong for keeping the democratic flame in Barbados alive.
“It is not easy to be keeping this type of flame alive, especially when you are having to compete with propaganda coming from quarters where money plays a very important part,” he said.