NDP – Where are the solutions?

The opposition New Democratic Party (NDP) has made a remarkable political recovery to the point where after two successive electoral defeats, it has been able to erode the support of the governing ULP to the extent that it professes confidence in being returned to office.{{more}}

True, that confidence was bandied about five years ago (remember “the NDP bus is rolling”), only for it to prove an illusion (the bus must have rolled in reverse), but this time the confidence is rooted in the victory of the “NO” campaign in last November’s referendum. The party and its supporters appear to genuinely believe that they will be victorious at the next elections and many outside their flock give them a good chance of doing so.

For these reasons, the NDP is beginning to come under greater public scrutiny than before. The more its leaders talk of “when we form the new government”, the more people like myself sit up to hear what plans the leadership has for the forward progress of our country. The last decade has been spent in oppositionist politics taking full advantage of the media; talk-show radio in particular. Now the time is overdue to put plans on the table. Thus the NDP’s recent Convention, its last before the next general elections, assumed even greater significance. If we are to believe the party that Gonsalves is going, then we ought to know in what direction his successors are taking us.

Ten years ago, NDP leader and then Prime Minister Sir James Mitchell, stepped down from office in the face of widespread popular opposition. He went on a beach stroll with his nemesis, Ralph Gonsalves to craft the infamous “Grand Beach Declaration”, agreeing to a premature end to his administration and handing the ____end of the stick to Mr. Arnhim Eustace to oversee the burial rites of his administration. Mitchell made sure that his legacy was intact, (he was fond of boasting that he was never going to sit on the Opposition bench in Parliament again) and retired, ostensibly to write his memoirs. Or so we thought.

Cast a humongous shadow

Lo and behold! One decade after his supposed retirement, Sir James continues to cast a humongous shadow over the leadership of his party. It was he who surfaced in the referendum, publicly changing the NDP strategy and even venturing into territory that his successor had not dreamed of, by declaring. “You can’t touch my Constitution”. This, after a solemn commitment on the part of Mr. Eustace, to the constitutional reform process. He even threatened one of Mr. Eustace’s deputies, St. Clair Leacock. In 2010, ten years after he had “gone home”, Sir James appeared at the NDP’s 32nd Annual Convention to lay down the line.

Sir James to clean up SVG?

If we were in doubt, not so was he. Sir James made it plain that 26 years after “cleaning up” SVG, he (not Eustace, Linton or Leacock) will have to do it again. From retirement? It was he who demanded a public apology from “the little boy with the dirty pants”, former Minister Burton Williams, not party leader Eustace, who is supposed to lead the team, Burton included, into the elections.

Interestingly, Mitchell is on record as saying that Burton had to apologise publicly because it was he (Burton) who gave us the two Beaches, a reference to the father and son combination of Sir Vincent Beache and son Glen, who took the South Windward seat from Burton and the NDP and have held it ever since. But if that is the yardstick, and Ralph Gonsalves is so bad as to cause Sir James to not only come on the campaign trail again, but to be committed to cleaning up our country again, then should he not apologize publicly to the nation for inflicting this “bad” Gonsalves on us? That would appear logical, but expediency, not logic is the name of the game. How much more humiliation does he intend to heap on poor Burton, the man dubbed on re-election to Parliament as “even Burton win his seat”, and who was later placed under Mitchell’s wing (presumably he never got close enough to the golden eggs)?

Deal with realities

After all the propaganda and rhetoric, any incoming government has to deal with the realities of projects and programmes of its predecessor. Gonsalves and the ULP had to come to grips with the Ottley Hall Scheme, much as they criticized it. Similarly, any NDP administration, should a change of government occur, will have to face up to the Argyle International Airport, in an advanced state of construction. It is one thing to curse Ralph, and cast aspersions on Cuba and Venezuela, another to address such a major project.

Is the Argyle airport a phantom project?

One would therefore have expected that the aspirant to the office of Prime Minister would lay out his party’s policy in that regard. But, sadly, all we got from him was a designation of the airport project as a “phantom” one. Phantom, to the best of my knowledge refers to something which does not physically exist – a ghost, illusion, apparition. Can we say that of the airport? It was Sir James, “retired” 10 years ago, who laid out policy on the airport. Who is really in charge?

(Space limitation requires me to pause here and continue next week)

Renwick Rose is a community activist and social commentator.