DLP president calls for a referendum

President of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), Verla De Peiza, is reiterating her stance there should be no move towards becoming a republic without a referendum.

Speaking during the Democratic Labour Party’s ‘No Referendum! No Republic!’ virtual meeting on Monday night, she pointed out that through the decades, the discussion surrounding the island becoming a republic had been sporadic at best and as such, no major decision to change the island’s Constitution should happen without the public’s say so.

“If we have been talking about it sporadically, I prefer to say romantically because it didn’t seem as though anybody was really taking it seriously, at the end of the day, we had two and now three Commissions on it and that will tell you how seriously we were about taking it to a Republic. Now I don’t think that anybody is seriously arguing, at this point, to remain under the Queen as the head of of our country. What we know is that the Queen’s representative, Governor General, has a constitutional position and if you look at our Constitution, you will see the GG has several functions and if it is that in September 2020, you signal a move to the Republic, one will expect that starting October 2020, you will have a conversation with your people, the people of Barbados, as to what that would look like,” she stressed. 

Pointing out there were varying models of republic states across the world, De Peiza questioned which format will the proposed republic here take, chiding the Mia Amor Mottley-led administration for the “virtual radio silence” on the matter for almost a year following the announcement.

“Despite the results of the last election, we are not in a dictatorship. It is not a decision that one person can make. It is not a decision that any country should take lightly and you cannot tell me seriously that you will appoint the first president absent of constitution – an illegal act. Any major constitutional change that we make at this point and I’m not talking about occasional changes that we make, I am talking about fundamental changes, like moving from a Governor General to a President, has to be considered changes because there are lasting in their impact. This is not a new change that we expect to go back to in another half of a century. We need to know what it is we are getting and it has to be more than saying that there will be a non-executive president, because we need to know exactly what that means, especially since it is not as simple as a name change,” the attorney-at-law charged.