Submitted by Beresford

The season of fun and frolic is over and the country returns to the bewildering scenes of DLP toxic spread. Like any pyramid scheme, the DLP tactic of promising new ventures even as the ones they announced yesterday fail, will come to an inevitable end – collapse. The fumes of the garbage tax has so blanketed the country that it has covered up much of what is still very much decaying and destroying the country.

In the vital tourism sector, it is as if one player can save the day. The DLP still cannot get its vaunted new administrative and marketing entities up and running. Meanwhile 40 more people on the breadline. And the Chairman could not have gone a moment too soon. They spin a new Sam Lord’s. At the same time as the news that yet another of the projects spouted to save Barbados – the Sugar Point Cruise Terminal is stuck. No funding. Same with the careenage development. Paradise. The housing developments. Road projects. Pickering, that great figment of imagination is now replaced with a focus on North Point.

So the pyramid scheme is built and continues to crumble.

The destruction of the economy and the accompanying downgrades is making it impossible for the DLP to secure money for its many “saviour” projects. Not one has yet seen the light of day. Meanwhile, as warned, the social fabric of Barbados unravels. One more indication of Barbados’ slide is the report of Human Development Index, (HDI), which has just reported on Barbados’ slide, dropping from the a position in the 30s before 2008 to position No. 59, according to the last report released on 22 July, 2014. An indication of Government’s investment in its people, the HDI measures various areas of building social capital and indicators such as maternal mortality – and the inexorable fall down the ladder under the DLP is reflective of its cuts to education, health, the hospital. The combination of an economy destroyed, incapacity to execute its own recovery plan and lack of investment in vital areas is shuffling Barbados surely to an inferno.

Killing Kadooment

The desperation of the DLP to rake in money, married to its muddled priorities and lack of thought, as well as its trampling on legalities, unfolded a few days before Kadooment when officers of the Barbados Revenue Authority, (BRA), descended on band houses seeking to examine records of registration, get projections of members and the like. Wrong thing at the wrong time.

What is the benefit to the Treasury of harassing a few bands whose VAT obligations cannot even reach $50 000? Is this all that people who have been given oversized salaries have time to do? BRA (when it was VAT) has engaged in high-handedness with a group which, more than most, takes extreme risks to contribute to the economy by providing the spectacle which climaxes Crop Over. This includes seizing, without notice or discussion, bands’ prize money, implementing a filing year as the bar – and then insisting that band leaders go back five years or more and barring bands from getting their subventions by mandating that the NCF does not release them. With nary a conversation.

This is not applied to companies in Barbados, some known to owe BRA millions in VAT. Further, why are bands, the vast majority of which simply produce a band as a one-off, seasonal activity, and many of which do not reach the $80 000 VAT registration threshold, still forced to register? This kind of myopic and vicious persecution will kill Kadooment – what is generally a losing proposition – and the very low numbers this year reveal the blows of the economy – because it is not worth the hassle.

As BLP economic spokesman, Dr. Clyde Mascoll said – in keeping with what bands have been asking for, for years – rather than set up Kadooment bands for the kill, an enlightened approach would be special tax considerations for bands. As to BRA, which has had threats of lawsuits over withholding land tax clearance certificates, who will guard the guards?

Come into my parlour……

And speaking of guarding, Barbados awaits this long promised conversation from the genius of silence Freundel Stuart. The man finds time for every innocuous thing, but despite his professed abilities, weighty matters cannot connect with his brain. The BLP, nor the rest of Barbados, for that matter, cares not about his waxing about a resignation from the BLP. The BLP will go on.

As Barbados knows, there is no comfort in anything Stuart says. He is expert at biting his tongue. His facility for history might not allow him to recall “a naked man, stripped down to the skin, of all of the arrogance and all of the hubris that the people of Barbados had to endure particularly over the last ten years”.

“I have listened to, with amused interest, to the Honourable Member for St. Peter who has delivered economic and policy statements in this Chamber for the last 14 years and as he spoke I kept asking myself if all that he was saying was true, what it was that the people of Barbados was dissatisfied about in the month of January.

“What it was that they were dissatisfied about for the last three/four years in this country if all of these solutions were within his embrace. Are the people of Barbados stupid? Don’t they know when they are feeling pain? Don’t they know when a government has divorced itself from their interests? Don’t they know when the policies of a government are inimical to their ideals?

No one is being fooled by the desperation of diversions and the self-serving politicking. The people of Barbados await seriousness and solutions.

Stuart, and others of his ilk, should regurgitate his speech and swallow it. Because the people of Barbados are NOT stupid. They know they are feeling pain. They know the DLP and others have divorced themselves from the people’s interests. They see that the DLP’s policies are inimical to their own ideals.

And they know the future does not lie in going backwards.