The announcement by former Prime Minister and Barbados Labour Party leader Owen Arthur, that he would be leaving the party which he had led from 1994 to 2013, cannot have been wholly unexpected by the Barbadian public. For Barbadians will have been aware for some time now that he had been chafing at the conduct of the BLP under his successor Mia Mottley, and there were signs that he was becoming more and more uncomfortable with her style and strategy of leadership.
It is not uncommon that long-time leaders of political parties in our region can sometimes not resist criticism of their successors, such behaviour giving rise to a feeling on the part of their traditional supporters that they should have another run for the top post. And readers will recall, to take one example, the decision of the one-time, long-serving Prime Minister of St Lucia John Compton to retake the leadership of his United Workers Party and seek, and then gain, re-election as Prime Minister of St Lucia.
Arthur’s discomfort with the leadership of Mia Mottley, who can herself be described as from a family of political aristocrats of the Barbados Labour Party, seems to have stemmed from her strategy of dealing with the leadership of the country by Democratic Labour Party Prime Minister Freundel Stuart. That discomfort seems to have led to a further discomfort on his part that the new BLP leader was not taking his own concerns and advice into consideration.
In other words, Arthur was more and more feeling left out of the political contest, at a time when he felt that the BLP, if properly led, could replicate his own defeat, as leader, of then Prime Minister Erskine Sandiford in 1994, at a time when, as now, the economy of Barbados was going through a serious economic crisis. And indeed, the ostensible reason for his resignation from the party is given as the result of his feeling that his advice that a Solid Waste Tax introduced by the government should be supported, with the BLP opposition deciding to go in all-out opposition to it.
At this time, Barbadians are undoubtedly feeling the effects of the global economic recession that commenced in 2008 with a financial recession emanating from the United States. As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has put it after a recent review of the state of the economy, the country has been experiencing “low growth, high debt, a large fiscal deficit and declining reserves.”
Arthur has claimed that during his tenure as Prime Minister he had had to introduce a not dissimilar measure to the Solid Waste Tax as a means of inducing a recovery from extreme fiscal deficit, and that it would be disingenuous of him to now oppose the present government. But political leader Mottley, and, it would appear, the majority of the leadership of the party, has insisted that the tax is likely to diminish the purchasing power of those who are required to pay the tax, and consequently keep the economy depressed.
Barbados has been under intense scrutiny by the IMF in recent times, and the organisation’s Managing Director Christine Lagarde has recently been in the country and has praised the government for its management, so far, of the recovery effort. Mottley will have seen Arthur’s advice as falling in line with the policy of the government, and thus inhibiting the opposition from gaining electoral mileage from what is, no doubt, unlikely to be a popular measure.
In addition, a now senior advisor to the BLP leadership, economist and former Minister in the Ministry of Finance, and some time protégé of Owen Arthur, Clyde Mascoll has argued on the party’s decision not to support the Solid Waste Tax, that “in the face of the evidence…the more taxes imposed on the economy the less revenue is being collected.”
Arthur, with his experience, and what is today seen as his undoubted success, of having led the country out of the economic doldrums when he took over from Erskine Sandiford in 1994, has obviously been feeling for some time that the new leadership of the BLP is not giving credence to his own views. That he has not resigned his seat in the Parliament, but will be sitting on the back benches, suggests that he wants to now have a certain freedom to elaborate those views.
But in the face of the difficulties being experienced by the government, BLP party supporters may well turn out to be seeing an individual who had been the longest serving Prime Minister of Barbados as something of a spoiler, at a time when the possibilities for electoral success for the party seem to be more positive than hitherto.
In fact, much will depend on the timeliness of a return from economic decline of the economy over the next three years or so. It is obvious that the IMF, with its programmes in Jamaica, and now in Barbados, has been placing some emphasis on ensuring that at least some Caribbean states now in economic difficulty, eventually prove the correctness of the organisation’s advice.
Part of that advice is a reduction in the role of the public sector, as evidenced by its proposal earlier in the year on a reduction in the personnel of that sector by approximately 3000. And as a statement following a visit of the IMF team to Barbados in the first week of June has insisted, part of the effort of “fiscal consolidation…is strengthened oversight and fundamental reform of the public enterprises” as key priorities.
Whether the resignation from the BLP of Arthur can have negative effects on the BLP’s standing is left to be seen. But it seems unlikely that, with the Democratic Labour Party likely to suffer unpopularity as a result of the measure being taken, too many supporters of the BLP will have much of an appreciative feeling for their former leader’s latest decision.
