#BTColumn – Disliking the party leader is common to both Bees and Dems

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By Glyne Murray

Just about a month ago, Barbadians felt that Dr Ronnie Yearwood’s decisive win in the contest for the Presidency of the DLP (Democratic Labour Party), clearly showed that its membership had openly and democratically taken a first step along the journey of rescuing the party from the tortuous path upon which it had found itself since its 30-0 general election loss in 2018, only to have that very same fate repeated in 2022.

However, it is to be hoped that President Yearwood and his supporters inside and outside of the DLP are not so naive as to believe that polling results of August 20 once and for all marked the end of internal hostilities to his victory. Recent events involving the St Peter branch have proven that any truce, hoped for or implied, has been at best short-lived.

But all of those sincerely interested in and actually working for the rebuilding of the 68-year-old institution should not be disheartened. This element of resistance even after the membership has spoken in voting that nobody seriously accused of not being free and fair, seems to be a customary reaction from those whose personal egos and political fantasies and ambition would have been shattered or even buried by Yearwood’s success over others.

As a matter of fact, my experience within the Barbados Labour Party has been that in the case of the late Prime Ministers Tom Adams and Owen Arthur, such emotional discomfort among some persisted throughout their premiership and even after their deaths among some political colleagues and associates, on the grounds that the two political heavy-weights had been pitch-forked over them by others in the party.

People finding this hard to accept would be shocked at how many individuals in their minds fancy that they could and should be party leaders and ultimately Prime Ministers. Public perception and obvious personal shortcomings notwithstanding, these critics use all kinds of spurious and highly personal reasons.

One of the arguments that Yearwood’s detractors used against him had to do with him not being a “true” Dem because of his previous association with the BLP, whose nomination for the St James South he had once sought. The illogic of such a charge can be found in the fact that any political “contamination” Errol Barrow and others might have picked up as BLP members did not stop them from forming the DLP in 1955 and championing it to forming the government in 1961 and making substantial contributions to our growth and development thereafter.

Dr. Yearwood’s maturity and open-mindedness have been evident as he proudly hails from Boscobelle in St. Peter – despite Barrow’s declaration that “Boscobelle is off the map, and Black Bess is behind God’s back” and the National Hero’s significant contribution to the improvement of Barbados and its people.

The harsh reality is that by any measure of education, training and lived experiences Yearwood would be a major intellectual gain for any political party in Barbados nowadays. Even the BLP knows this and that is why top members of its leadership tried to have him win its nomination in the same St James South in 2018. I was among those who thought such a move unfair to Sandra Husbands who had performed creditably in 2013 and had stayed in touch with the constituency, while Yearwood was a comparative newcomer.

But what should not be minimised is the rich endowment of social and political capital Yearwood has brought to the DLP as the embodiment of a genuine working-class background to its leadership, perhaps equivalent to what another St Peter product, late PM Arthur from Benn Hill, and which drastically altered the heavily elitist reputation of the BLP and made possible Arthur leading them to three consecutive general election victories.

For a while, it seemed as if elements of such DLP elitism could and would prevail over the political assets Yearwood brought with him. In the end, the far better judgement of the foot soldiers prevailed over those afflicted by a grandiose but misplaced sense of entitlement. More on this factor, common to the Bees and the Dees, on another occasion.

Meanwhile, Yearwood, the DLP and the public can expect further public outbreaks of the anti-Yearwood guerilla skirmishes in social media, the rumour mill and so on.

Glyne Murray is an author, former diplomat, cabinet minister in Barbados Labour Party administrations and journalist.