‘Mottley an outstanding politician’

Opposition Leader, Mia Mottley, is an “outstanding politician” who can and in fact has “competed favourably” with her male counterparts in politics.

This is the view that was expressed by Political Analyst and Director of the Caribbean Development Research Services (CADRES), Peter Wickham, who at the time was delivering the National Organisation of Women (NOW) lecture at Solidarity House on Monday night.

“After 50 years of Independence, we finally have a female candidate who is leading one of the two main political parties and it looks as if she has a reasonable chance of winning… It is also significant that we also have another political party – UPP – that is not in Parliament, but then we have the UPP being led in Parliament by a woman. So the UPP has two female leaders – the political leader who is outside of Parliament and the parliamentary leader who for the next three weeks would be the minority leader of the Opposition. So Barbados now has two new leaders of the Opposition – the leader of the majority Opposition and the leader of the minority Opposition and they are both women,” Wickham noted.

He stated that Mottley’s rise is important because she has shattered the glass ceiling in the political arena.

“The Mottley elevation is significant for women because it shatters the political glass ceiling. So what of Mottley as a politician in and of herself and what are some of the key points that we can take away from her elevation. The first point that I want to make of Mottley is that I think that she is an outstanding politician and she compares favourably with any man that is in politics or that has been in politics recently and indeed, she has outperformed many men as well.”

The political analyst pointed out that she has achieved all of these things on her own as she was not given any special treatment because she is a woman.

“You are dealing with an in-dividual who has had a similar ride as most politicians, an individual who has done well as a politician withstanding the fact that she was a woman. She was not given any special quarter because she was a woman and certainly she has not taken any because she was a woman.”

Furthermore, in four of the six times that she has ran, she has increased her voter count, said Wickham.

“I always say that a politician attempts, when you go into an election, to gain more votes than he did last time because that is the idea of what a perfect politician ought to do. The person that has come closest in terms of the type of analysis that I am doing, in that kind of situation or one of the people who has come the closest is Mia Mottley. In that she has fought six battles, she lost one, sought re-election five times and on four of those occasions, she actually increased her vote share.” (PJT)