The parliament of Barbados today debated amendments to the Co-operative Societies Act. A member of the BU household listened to the ‘live’ debate with great interest and filed the following comment by email:
Several contributions were made on both sides of the Lower House which in a nutshell lauded the contributions by the several credit unions to the development of Barbados through the years. Special mention was made of of the assistance which credit unions have made to enfranchising the working class population of Barbados. We don’t agree with some of the amendments to the Co-operative Societies Act but we will defer comments until later. The fireworks bursted into a bond fire when Minister of State Clyde Mascoll rose to close the debate. In his opening remarks he labeled the contribution by Leader of the Opposition as ‘trash’ but he was quickly persuaded by the Deputy Speaker to withdraw his disparagingly reference to the Honorable member of St. John.
Before one could blink the debate descended to the bottom of a 40 foot pit toilet. In Thompson’s earlier contribution to the debate he had made mention to the time when Prime Minister Owen Arthur accused Clyde Mascoll, then a Democratic Labour Party (DLP) member of parliament and a director of the Barbados Public Workers Credit Union of misappropriating funds from the credit union. We always get a kick out of how MP’s under the cloak of parliamentary privilege seek to rubbish the reputations of law abiding citizens in the country. Those of us who heard that debate remember Arthur telling Mascoll to bring back the credit union money! Mascoll in his wind-up of the debate elected to defend himself by referring to the current DLP candidate Stephen Lashley who was the Chairman of the credit union board at the time, by deflecting Arthur’s accusation to mean the whole board. He also went on to mention the name Irene Sandiford-Garner who is another current DLP candidate. We will leave off the details about Mrs Irene Sandiford-Garner because we feel it was unfortunate that Mascoll mentioned her name at all. Mascoll’s opening contribution was interrupted several times by Thompson who rose on a point of order to remind Minister Mascoll that he should confine his rebuttal to what Thompson had referenced Arthur as saying. Eventually the Deputy Speaker was able to wrestle order and a ruffled Mascoll continued with the job of winding up the debate.
Lessons learnt from the clash between Mascoll and Thompson this afternoon:
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There is much blood letting which the public can anticipate in the upcoming election because of a vendetta which as emerged between the two
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Mascoll, of the two appeared more ruffled and came over as immature in his desire to divert a serious debate for what seemed to be personal reasons. If we extrapolate based on the Mascoll performance this evening then…
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Arthur’s continued absence from the Lower House created a vacuum which seems to have prematurely elevated Mascoll to speak on economic matters. Although Mascoll spoke with passion and showed intellect in his contribution we were let down at his inability to fuse some social concerns raised by other members in his presentation
All in all we were disappointed with the overall level of the debate which as usual proceeded down the party line.
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