The door to constitutional recognition of political parties and an end to parliamentarians switching allegiances was left wide open as Prime Minister Mia Mottley endorsed a landmark proposal to formally register and regulate parties.
Since Independence in 1966, the Constitution of Barbados has been silent on political parties. Members of Parliament are elected to represent the constituency rather than a political party. But on Tuesday, Mottley suggested the time had come to bring greater transparency and structure to political party operations on the island.
“The commission took the view that political parties ought to be registered and that to qualify as a political party an entity has to have a chairman, a treasurer, a principal place of business, and a bank account,” she said. “But that failure to register should not be a bar to any group in calling itself a political party, or from running in an election.”
The prime minister described the current situation as a “farce”, declaring that political parties are the backbone of parliamentary democracy and deserve to be properly regulated. Registration would also pave the way for party names to appear on the ballot next to candidates, enhancing voter clarity, she claimed.
While not naming him directly, Mottley’s comments were a clear reference to Christ Church South MP Ralph Thorne, who last year severed ties with the ruling Barbados Labour Party and joined the Democratic Labour Party, becoming the new opposition leader.
“There are people like the member for Christ Church South who may feel that they got elected on their own merit, and that the party to which he belonged then, the Barbados Labour Party, had no part in his election,” she said.
Quoting the legal luminary Jack Dear, who died in 1997, she added: “You argue a case once in court. I say simply that whatever else the member for Christ Church South will have to say on how he got elected and who helped him get elected, we will argue that case once—this time not in a law court, but in the court of public opinion at the next election.”
Mottley went further, signalling her personal support for a constitutional change that would require MPs who cross the floor to return to the people for a fresh mandate.
She said: “There is a strong view that there should be an immediate return to the electorate, should a person cross the floor and seek to leave the party from which they are elected to be able to continue to serve. If they win the seat, there is no problem, but what they have done is to go back to the people who elected them in the first place and allow the people who elected them to make the decision whether they want to elect them again in the Parliament of Barbados.
“I can only say that I am a strong supporter personally of that, because I believe that anything else other than that is disingenuous at best. It does not leave room for the people who we represent to be able to have a say.”
But the prime minister also rejected the idea of adopting proportional representation based on party lists, insisting that such models often lead to autocracy and erode voter choice.
Mottley said: “In the countries where I have seen party list voting, there is a dangerous descent into autocratic behaviour, and into a narrow vision that often does not reflect the considerations of the wider public. This is a matter that people of this Parliament, on top of the recommendations of this Parliamentary Reform Commission with all of the consultations that it has done, will have ultimately to sign off on.”
She insisted that Barbadians have long proven that, though they may align themselves to a political party on the surface, they remain fiercely independent when it comes to their vote.
(SB)
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