On Sunday, the Saint Lucia Labour Party (SLP) held its 74th annual conference of delegates. The conference was held at the Belle Vue Combined School in Vieux Fort and featured guest speaker Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
During his presentation, Gonsalves explained that his Unity Labour Party (ULP) and its predecessor the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Labour Party had strong fraternal links with the SLP.
“As a young man, I was a rebel because there was, from the time I was a youth, a lot to be rebellious about. I am now an old man but I am still a rebel and I cannot stop being a rebel because there are many things still to rebel about,” Gonsalves told his audience.
“Although we have made immense progress in our Caribbean civilisation, there are things which we still need to address,” he explained.
According to the Vincentian leader, as Small Island developing states there are inherent vulnerabilities. “And in an age of rampaging man-made climate change, those vulnerabilities are more problematic and despite our strengths and possibilities, we have weaknesses and limitations and the contemporary political economy is very unfair to small island developing states,” he said.
Gonsalves pointed to the ongoing wars and conflicts and their impact on the prices of commodities and the disruption of supply chains as well as past “native genocide and the enslavement of African peoples and indentured labour from India and Madeira.”
“For the native genocide and the enslavement of African bodies committed by European nations, we demand reparations,” he said.
The charismatic speaker said that there now existed a neo liberalism, a newer form of imperialism, where the central contradiction is between those who support democracy and those who support autocracy.
“Well, we are democratic societies and we always chose democracy, but the way we see it the central contradiction is not between democracy and autocracy. It has been, it is and we have to fight against it, the central contradiction is about who gets what, when, where and how,” he stated.
“And those in the imperial centers of the world, never mind their sweet talk, never mind their double talk, never mind their attempt to send the fool a little further, make no mistake, we have a struggle on our hands and we can only fight this battle if internally the progressive forces are united and if also we link ourselves with progressive forces in the region and globally,” he stated.
Describing himself as now an older and wiser rebel, Gonsalves recalled the Grenada revolution in March 1979 where he and others were banned from entering certain countries including Saint Lucia.
“Things are more complicated now. The alliances, you need to be more careful how you construct them. We have to have different paths. We have to enjoin creative resistance and the building of a different and better society,” Gonsalves said.
He went on to espouse the vision and beliefs of the “Labour family”, the first of which he said was the supremacy of God and the freedom and dignity of man and woman.
The philosophy, he declared, is a universal philosophy of social democracy.
“We hold dear that there is something called a Caribbean civilisation which has come through the fever of history and through the process of creolisation in our own seascape and landscape we have fashioned a functioning civilization, our own of which there is a magnificent Saint Lucian component and our duty is to further enhance the ennoblement of that civilization,” he said.
