Submitted by People’s Democratic Congress (PDC)
“They want me to play a part in politics because of my humane approach to helping people, but the price I paid for entering politics (elective) in the first place would take another 20 years to overcome. I was happy for the opportunity to have undertaken a political life, but the politics I want to see is a people’s politics. That does not exist now. The politics I see now is not about representing people”
Gray Brome – May 26, 2012, Saturday Sun – p.17
The above comments were part of what seemed to have been the putting forth of some very frank and telling socio-political perspectives by Mr. Gray Brome in an interview with Nation Newspaper journalist Barry Alleyne recently.
Clearly, this interview was yet another opportunity for him to get across to the Barbadian public communication on what seems – judging from the tone and temper of those published perspectives – to be a very heavy internal burden that he continues to carry as a result of some mental and psychological scars that he would have got from his having gone through some previously harrowing traumatic experiences in BLP politics in this country.
This is not the first time many members of the public would have witnessed Mr. Brome expressing such critical views in the Nation newspapers. For, on a few previous occasions, as a result of his doing a couple of interviews with Nation newspaper reporters over a period of time too, some members of the public would have managed to have read in the Nation newspaper about his own great political disenchantment with BLP/DLP politics in this country, as well as they would have got to have read about his personal bitterness, disgust and frustration with the party political process and the political culture that helps to reinforce and recondition the former in Barbados.
Many Barbadians would know that Mr. Gray Brome is a humble soft spoken down to earth man who gives and helps others wherever he can tirelessly; that he is the owner of Pizza Man Doc; that he is a former unsuccessful BLP St. Lucy candidate in the 1999 general election in Barbados, and that he is a former BLP Senator who was unfairly forced out of the Senate in the early 2000s to make way for another BLP senator. At the time then there was the very said ill-conceived ignoble thrust on the part of Prime Minister Arthur to remove some so-called grassroots politicians from contention for the BLP candidacy.
But, in publicly courageously baring his political soul again, and in the way he has done it, he has himself stood head and shoulders above those persons who ordinarily would leave first and then later go back and rejoin the ranks of either of these two old discredited corrupt DLP or BLP factions – or who consciously would stifle their consciences and compromise on political best practices and principles on seeing the great levels of corruption and cannibalism and therefore remain among such nastiness and perversion and still do nothing about them.
So, the carrying of this burden seems still to have been bringing out some of the best political philosophies out of Mr. Brome, and seems to have been making him political ideologically stronger and better as a political person. For, this very successful entrepreneur has done the public of Barbados a great civic service by speaking out so matter-of-factly about some of the pathological terminal sicknesses and disgraces of the BLP and DLP. No other former DLP or BLP candidate – with the exception of Mr. David Comissiong – has been rightly berating these two jack o lantern parties publicly as much as he has been doing.
So, it is in light of this model Barbadian citizen’s political backbone and openness in respect of his challenging the moral intellectual and political characters of the main gatekeepers of this extant political managerial order, and fundamentally because he has done so as a business person who has risked political repercussions to his enterprise (which says so much about the power and influence of this man and those who support him – not even Sir Allan Fields, Sir David Seale, Mr. Geoffrey Cave, Mrs. Ram Merchandani, Sir Charles Williams, and Mr. Ralph Williams has spoken publicly like he has), that we in the PDC have decided to make some of those perspectives contained in the Nation Newspaper story part of the thinking informing this particular PDC article.
What we would also wish to let many persons on BU and elsewhere know is that these selected perspectives and the other major points, themes and allusions in the news story ought to make compulsory reading and insight for them. What Mr. Brome has gone and done is to have been making these very gruesome experiences of his serve – and on the basis of his sharing some of them with others via the media again – as another lesson or another fore-warning to many Barbadians who go and who so wrongly and mistakenly put their confidence and trust in DLP and BLP parliamentarians and political figures to do so many things for them, and who then especially after elections have been concluded, get the run around and turn around, owing to many false and unrealistic promises that were made to them by those same political figures. Indeed, it can be argued that the great pizza maker does not wish for many others to feel the pain and misery like he has of these said uncultured sick persons – that is why it was reported in the piece in the said Saturday Sun that he wants to see a complete change in the way how politicians treat people after they are elected.
So, when later he is reported as having made his strongest point in the news story, that he wants to see a people’s politics in Barbados – which does not exist now….. And that this politics that he sees now is not about representing people, it is clear that he has done a serious study of the political culture in Barbados, and that he has morphed his own personal philosophy about his love for people into a call for a people centered national politics for Barbados. For it is the cardinal truth – and this is what the PDC knows – having ourselves been studying this aspect of the political sociology of Barbados, that, since Mr. Barrow’s death in 1987, there has been no people-centered politics that has been at the heart of the politics of the DLP and BLP – whether they have been in government or in opposition.
The once cherished sacred social empowerment populist conviction type of politics has been deliberately relegated over the years to the intellectual political storerooms of these two old discredited corrupt parties, in order to clear the way sufficiently from inside of the bosoms of these factions for the very outright naked upgrading of the very narrow partisan personal familial financial and corporate interests around which these jack o lantern factions have come to revolve.
Furthermore, we have been constantly saying it to as many people as possible that the DLP and BLP are, politically sociologically speaking, primarily about their own leaderships’ principals’ personal political financial interests, their own individual members personal financial interests, some of these individual members’ own familial interests, some of their friends’ corporate financial interests, and about the corporate financial interests of a few. Hence, these two factions are not about the public’s interests, the nation’s interests on the whole in this country.
Finally, in yet another powerful political analysis Mr. Brome has realized that so-called politicians in Barbados have vested interests in only those citizens who could empower them financially, and has therefore alluded to the fact that rather than empowering many more people in Barbados these so-called politicians have been empowering themselves through those same politically financially powerful people, whilst, as he said, encouraging them to be hand to mouth. What Mr. Brome is definitely saying here is that this current crop of DLP/BLP parliamentarians and political figures are standing in the way of the empowerment of the great masses and middle classes and for that he is partially right.
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