Opposition ‘split’ amid anti-gov’t pressure

Analysis by Rickey Singh

GUYANESE would be familiar with the “heads will roll” warning of an earlier period in the political culture of governance politics between the Peoples Progressive Party and People’s National Congress.Well, the threat of such a development has now emerged within the ranks of the parliamentary Opposition Barbados Labour Party (BLP) where growing dissent among leading Party stalwarts have moved from internal

status to the public domain.
And amid the final stages of the country’s intoxicating annual cultural festival, ‘Crop Over’ — Bajan’s equivalent to Guyanese ‘Mashramani’ or Trinis’ carnival — Prime Minister Freundel Stuart’s governing Democratic Labour Party could well have a respite from incessant political batterings to which it has been subjected for some two months now.
Barbadians, across the political divide and social classes, have been angrily engaging the print and electronic media over a new form of taxation that they view as most onerous and punishing.
At the core of prevailing widespread expressions of disenchantment is the government’s introduction of an across-the-board ‘municipal solid waste tax’ (SWT). Based on the estimated value of private and business properties, the tax has sent all classes of owners howling — the rich, middle and working class.
Amid rising clamours to ‘dump’ or ‘repeal’ the tax (which must be paid by this month-end with a penalty fee for late payments), the opposition BLP may have unwittingly fumbled into trapping itself by a surprising display among some of its more influential representatives by publicly baring its internal differences in pressuring the government to repeal the controversial tax.
For the benefit of Chronicle readers, it is relevant to point out that, helpful as it may be to the government in enabling needed financing to the State-run Sanitation Service Authority (SSA) for waste disposals, the new SWT, in effect, amounts to a double tax for owners of the same property.
This time around, however, instead of property owners receiving the customary payment notice on ‘land tax’, they have received from the Barbados Revenue Authority (BRA) due payment on the new Municipal Solid Waste tax, which, incidentally, is supposedly based on the prevailing land tax.

TWO TAXES; SAME LAND
This, in essence, means having to make TWO separate payments for the same property, as previously assessed, and by this month- end or face a penalty fee.
Well, former three-term Prime Minister and leader of the BLP, Owen Arthur, felt this was simply too unfair and burdensome. So he launched a campaign in his own St. Peter parliamentary constituency to roll-back the Solid Waste Tax and, hopefully, to influence wider public support outside of the BLP.

Meanwhile, as Prime Minister Stuart and his much-pressurised Finance Minister, Chris Sinckler, were signalling gestures for remedial initiatives (without any whole-scale dumping of the new

municipal tax), there came a proposal from the BLP’s leader and former Deputy Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, for an alternative approach in helping the Revenue Authority meet the financial burden of the Sanitation Service Authority.
She proposed a smaller and more equitable levy on existing water bills from the Barbados Water Authority (BWA), but not including Barbadians who fall under the prevailing ‘poverty line’.
Mottley feels so strongly against the government’s ‘solid waste tax’, that she announced, at a mass meeting of her Party in Bridgetown on Sunday night, that she was ready to lead a “protest walk” from Parliament building to Government headquarters today, even if it meant “walking alone”!

MOTTLEY’S FIRM STAND
However, it soon became apparent that disagreements exist within the top and middle echelons on strategies to be pursued by the Party in both the short and longer term, as the media were to learn from various spokespersons of the BLP.
One leading BLP parliamentarian, Kerry Simmonds, who has maintained close working relations with ex-Prime Minister Arthur, was to inform a radio talk-show on Monday that he had declined to speak at the BLP’s Sunday night meeting as a consequence of differing approaches to the new “solid-waste tax”.
By this past Tuesday, the Barbados Nation was reporting another BLP parliamentarian, Trevor Prescod — known to be more favourable to Mottley — as having described with bitterness unnamed elements of the Party as “snakes in the grass…”
Stay tuned for new developments as we await developments today, when the BLP’s leader carries out her threat to head a march of protest against the government.