Anonymous Contributor
Week-after-week, the Opposition Barbados Labour Party appears to be ending up with egg on its face. It is as if, having reviewed its leadership, you would now be well advised to talk what that party is saying with a pinch of salt.
Let’s start with the By-election. For almost 21 days, the BLP went across the length and breadth of St. John, trying to pull down Mara Thompson while telling the people to find her “unacceptable” because, in the BLP’s view, she is an “affront” to Barbadians. It therefore came as a real shock to Barbadians when on the morning she was being seated in Parliament, the very person who told the people of St. John that they must find her “unacceptable” and an “affront,” told the Parliament of Barbados that he wanted to extend his most sincere welcome to her, as a new member of the House of Assembly. It is this level of political hypocrisy why people are joining the cause for a new politics in Barbados.
It was also at that point that it occurred to me that whenever a Barbadian has cause to look in your direction and say: “you ain’t have no shame at all,” you know that you have a very serious problem. Is the leadership of the BLP now in the practice of trying to grab headlines? Could it be that the new BLP leadership is slowly realising that it is not resonating with the people and is therefore attempting to jump onto ‘the Mara Thompson bandwagon’ in a desperate attempt to save face and regain, unrecoverable, lost ground?
Is the BLP only now changing its tune because it again finds itself on the wrong side of public opinion? Tapes of the nightly meetings would show that even after being spoken to by two regional Prime Ministers, the leader of the BLP was adamant that he was not going to change his stance, that she was “unacceptable.”
Here is something else that is causing right thinking Barbadians to hold their heads in shame. The new Leadership of the BLP is saying that it will not support any attempt to change the laws of Barbados to accommodate anyone person becoming Chief Justice. No one was prepared for the shock they were about to receive, when a few days later, the person, whose name is being mentioned, was reported as having said that he was approached by the BLP member for St. Joseph (the new BLP leader’s deputy) while that member was serving as Attorney General of Barbados. This is what I mean by “egg on its face.”
The Barbados Labour Party does not seem to recognise that even its members are turned off by this type of political hypocrisy and are calling for a new politics that is more humane. But another day goes by and under its reviewed leadership – the BLP makes yet another mistake, while being too consumed with its own relevance and self importance to even realise that it is turning off too many people to fast (including its own base) with each passing day.
What Barbadians continue to find reprehensible, is the fact that the people now ruling the BLP are behaving as though they have done nothing wrong and have nothing to apologise to Barbadians for or be sorry about. In some societies, that is called arrogance: the thin line between seeking consideration to serve or a person or group making the bold statement that he or they have a divine right to rule.
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