At St. Patricks last Sunday evening, there was the optical illusion of Mia Mottley arriving and being introduced to the audience and her bearing forth in the “belly” of her speech. For some strange and unimaginable reason, Mottley is using Taurus Riley’s “She’s Royal” as her theme song when making her way to the platform and as part of her formal introduction. That is an error of enormous proportions!
The song and other semantics set the stage for a Hillary Clilnton or a Portia Simpson-like presentation, but within moments of her starting to speak all that femininity is lost and what emerges is a swashbuckling, bare knuckles performance from “one of the boys”.
Say what you would about Dame Billie Miller or the late Dame Mary Eugenia Charles, they stood out as ladies in a man’s world. They never sought to ‘out-man’ the men. They brought a refreshing, feminine perspective that motivated and inspired their audience to listen. They did not bully the listener. Even Sarah Palin remains ‘a woman in a man’s world’, and she has had to battle the toughest of what America has to offer.
Mottley has developed the tendency of bellowing in a haranguing type of way that makes it necessary for her to land repeated punches in order to animate and sustain the interest of her audience. The flaw in her St. Patricks’ presentation is that she had no punches to land. She really had nothing to say.
The meeting was clearly in reaction to the thought; some may say fear, of Owen Arthur drawing a crowd at his previously announced constituency branch meeting.
At the end of an epic week of “wage freeze” discussion, there would obviously have been interest in what Arthur had to say. But Mottley, it would appear, panicked and went for the jugular. Spurred on by one or two sycophants, she used her powers of “veto” to pull the plug on Arthur’s meeting and summoned the entire Barbados Labour Party family and its well wishers to St. Patricks. The organizers would have been disappointed with the less than 500 persons that showed up, especially when it is recalled that Michael Lashley had close to 1,000 the week before at his Constituency Conference.
So coming after the not very dynamic Dale Marshall, Mottley clearly had to lift the meeting from ground zero. Most persons used the occasion of Marshall speaking to quench their thirst or empty their bladder. It was therefore necessary for Mottley to get into the ‘red meat’ of her presentation early, so as not to have a mass exodus of persons while still at the podium. She therefore began by threatening political prosecution of David Estwick and the Democratic Labour Party for what she termed ‘the great betrayal’.
This Great Betrayal, it turned out, was the number of promises in the Democratic Labour Party’s 2008 manifesto that had to date not been delivered upon. Mia Mottley is not rating the government at the end of its fifth year. Neither is she ticking off its failings at the end of the fourth or even third year in office. This third generation politician has determined that 23 months is the point at which she should pass judgment on the achievements of a party that has been given 60 months to govern. February 7th 2010 was less than 24 months that the new government had been sworn into office, and yet Mottley called out her troops to speak to them on broken promises. This is the sort of stuff that political comedies are made of!
The hush that came over the crowd spoke volumes about the bewilderment of the audience as Mottley enumerated items that they themselves knew would have been impossible to deliver in the current economic circumstances. This is the type of poor judgment that a Leader of the Opposition in 2010 cannot afford to display.
But Mottley did not stop there. She shot herself in the foot by removing the authorship of the “wage freeze” initiative from David Estwick and the DLP Government and placing it squarely in the lap of an internationally recognized group of independent analysts.
All speakers prior to Mottley had sought to lay blame for the wage freeze proposal at the feet of “this cruel and uncaring government”. The suggestion by Estwick, they said, was tantamount to war being declared on the poor people of Barbados. Indeed, the placement of the meeting in St. Patricks, the heart of Estwick’s constituency, and the launch of Roger Smith, as his opponent in the next general elections, were in response to what was touted as Estwick’s grievous bodily harm to the workers of Barbados. Yet, Mottley, in her desperation to land a “coo coo” punch, revealed to the audience that it was actually not Estwick or the DLP that had conceived of the wage freeze initiative, but that it was the International Monetary Fund that came up with the idea and that Estwick was merely verbalizing what he had read. Well immediately thinking persons in the audience began to look at each other. The reason for inviting them there was now even more baffling.
If it was not Estwick and the Dems that wanted to inflict “hurt and pain” on the workers of Barbados, then what was all the fuss about? That was the million dollar question persons were asking as they made their way from the meeting to their respective vehicles.
But that was not all! In her quest to curry favor with public officers, Mottley pointed out that the government’s total wage bill was somewhere in the vicinity of 1.3 billion a year and that the minimum three per cent increase that she felt workers should receive would amount to somewhere in the vicinity of $40 million per annum. Okay! So far so good!
But then Mottley proceeded to itemize “the fat” that should be cut to compensate for that $40 million in additional expenditure and she came up with the princely sum of the $1.6 million spent to date on Constituency Councils and $3 million spent on summer camps. Oh yeah! There was then the $15 000 a month that she claimed is paid to one Hartley Henry as Political Advisor.
So the Einstein recommendation from the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to the Government of Barbados in respect of salary increases for 2010, is that it should go ahead and permit a $40 million increase in its wage bill and compensate for that additional expenditure by dissolving Constituency Councils, scrapping summer camps and firing Hartley Henry. And then Mia Mottley wonders why Owen Arthur, a patriotic Barbadian, is scared of her leading this country!
So Barbadians are today no better for having heard Mia Mottley and the faction of the Labour Party that she leads. Even though the Hon. Prime Minister has spoken and has calmed many fears in relation to the wage freeze frenzy and other aspects of fiscal policy that had been distorted, there is still a void in the discussion. Barbadians are accustomed to two sided arguments. They like the government and the opposition to put their respective positions on a matter and then use their 98 per cent literacy rate to themselves decipher and decide.
After the events of the past seven days, the government’s position has been clearly put by the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. Even if you do not agree with David Thompson, you know and understand where he is coming from. He has been dealt a tough hand and he is playing it as best he or anyone else could.
With the bungling of the glorious opportunity presented Mia Mottley to put her case and that of the Barbados Labour Party, Owen Arthur will now have to step in to fill the breach. How Mottley could have gone to St. Patricks to speak on the economy with no Arthur, no Clyde Mascoll and no Tyrone Barker is madness in the extreme. But, that is what power struggles are made of. Now, the same Owen Arthur, who was denied an opportunity to address a small constituency branch one week ago, will have a national stage on which to perform whenever he mounts his soap box again.
Nature abhors a vacuum and the void at the helm of the Barbados Labour Party is becoming bigger and more pronounced for all to see. Stopping Owen Arthur from speaking last Sunday could turn out to be a costly error for Mia Mottley.
This thriller has only just begun!
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