PM STUART READY

ENERGISED! That’s how Leader of the Democratic Labour Party and Prime Minister of Barbados the Rt. Hon. Freundel Stuart feels after the party’s official campaign launch, which was held on Sunday night before a large crowd of party faithful at the National Stadium.

He made the comments yesterday after completing the nomination process at the Graydon Sealy School.

According to the Prime Minister, “I felt quite energised by the obvious energy of the DLP base and those who attended the meeting. I think the platform was a fairly energetic platform.”

The Prime Minister said while he is aware that the DLP has come under attack for statements made on the platform during the launch, he said “that is always a good sign”.

“It is never a good sign when your adversaries are praising you. Whenever your adversaries are praising you it means that you are behaving as they want you to behave. So I was quite satisfied with last night [Sunday],” the PM noted.

He said he was aware that there was specific criticism that too much time was spent during the launch discussing the Opposition Leader and not enough time was spent pointing to the way forward for Barbados.

“We have until the night of May 23 to tell the people of Barbados what we plan to do about solving their problems,” he stated. “We were in the constituency of the leader of the Opposition and we were there for a very good reason. And she had to be the focus of last night’s [Sunday’s] meeting. We are not going to be there every night so she will not be the focus of the campaign every night although I am sure she will come in for mention as we move around the country because she is campaigning to be the next Prime Minister of Barbados,” he explained.

“So we cannot ignore that fact, but we were in her constituency last night [Sunday], we went there for a particular reason to put her under the microscope and that is what we did,” he pointed out.

With regards to observations that the DLP seems to be lacking posters and other paraphernalia the Prime Minister responded: “We do not regard an election campaign as a parade of shirts and posters. I am aware that we’ve been having posters and so on since January. In fact in this constituency as in so many others, so far as our adversaries are concerned voters now find themselves in a position where they have to choose between the faded candidate and the fresh one, because posters were out so long,” he mused.

“We have been doing things our way. Yes we will have posters out in our way in the not too distant future. Let’s be very frank about it, the issues in this campaign are not going to be about how many posters you have on poles and how many people have on this or that colour shirt. There are critical issues that have to be discussed about the future of Barbados and that is where the focus of the DLP is,” he assured. (JH)