Slogans and catch-phrases are part of the stock-in-trade of political parties in their political campaigns. They are intended to fire the imagination of the electorate, to offer the would-be voter in a sound-byte, in one- or two-liners, what the party programme is all about and to persuade them to cast their ballots in support of the party which authors them.
Who can forget the SLP’s “En Rouge!” or the UWP’s “Yo Pè!”. Remember the PLP’s “Forward Ever Backward Never”? These all had an undeniable resonance with the party faithful and with those seeking something exciting that might lead them to lend that party their support. That such slogans may capture the imagination may seem puerile, nevertheless there seems to be a certain psychology to it that communications and propaganda practitioners have found to be effective.
Some catch-phrases may seem a little more explicit of a political group’s philosophy, like the Labour Party’s 2021 campaign mantra, “Putting People First” and some may seek, as suggested earlier, to focus on key elements of a party’s programmatic platform. When they seek to do this, if they fall flat or do not ring true, they may have very limited effect in terms of accomplishing what they are intended to. The latest UWP or Flambeau offering to the electorate apparently falls well short of the ideal slogan or battle-cry. And perhaps this is an understatement!
7 Policies to Save Our Saint Lucia falls flat — a tired unimaginative rehash of dékouché fare from earlier campaigns. The kind of offering that the “visionary” Chastanet has become quite adept and handing us. His fetish for magical numbers like 5 and 7. Remember the 2021 UWP campaign that foundered and died on the rocks of a moribund “5-to-Stay-Alive”?!
So dead and ineffectual is the Flambeau 7-Policies slogan that they have been at pains to offer some kind of explanation of what that slogan would mean in practice. The trouble is that it may have been better to leave it unexplained and as a mystery number 7 which you and I would interpret as we see fit. It is so reminiscent of the dead-in-the-water 5-to-Stay-Alive, that the UWP have found themselves having to go to great unconvincing lengths to adumbrate the various elements into which the slogan may be dis-aggregated. And they have found themselves in a self-inflicted minefield.
Let us examine some of the elements of this “7 Policies to transform Saint Lucia”.
The first is to remove the 2.5% health and security Levy. The levy is a measure that, at its introduction, garnered wide support in view of the need for devoting more financial resources to our health and security services. It should be noted that this was introduced after Chastanet’s government had frittered away some $23 million of our financial resources to Cayman City to manage the transition to OKEU — a task which was being effectively undertaken by Dr. Stephen King’s eminently qualified team. This 2.5% provides a small fraction of what is required to fund our health services, and to fund the resources the police need to address the crime situation. The unprecedented investment in our police services by the SLP government is proof enough that the levy, a small charge against a few not-so-essential items, is being effectively allocated to initiatives against violent crime. We should not forget that this has been made necessary by Chastanet’s unconscionable defunding of the police training vote which has now been restored. It should not be overlooked, that while the Flambeau government were holding charity balls for the police, they presided over greatest percentage increase in violent crime ever!
Reduction of gas prices — that disingenuous and dishonest campaign surfaces again. A whole protest was contrived around a supposed $6.40 being exacted upon the populace by the then Labour Government, which was never substantiated. A myth that was exploded by the technocrats in the ministry of Finance. One needs only to recall that on the day of the swearing in of his cabinet in 2016, Allen Chastanet declared that he was about to sign documents which would automatically reduce the price of petrol, a commodity over whose prices on the international market we have no control. He increased the excise tax by $1.40 per gallon instead! Of course I will not go into the utter buffoonery (not to say dishonesty) of the claim that Mr. Chastanet could simply, Trump-like, affix his signature to a document and gas prices would come tumbling down, completely ignoring the landed costs of refined oil, the margin that goes to importers and dealers, and the fact that his own government would subsequently increase the excise tax. One also needs to reflect on the fact that they deliberately ignore that the average working-class household benefits immensely from the subsidising of LPG which is only made possible by the architecture of petroleum prices, and that this is the very pricing mechanism that the Chastanet regime presided over.
Then there is the same old hat of Health Insurance which was a campaign pledge of theirs that never came to fruition, and which is fraught with so many pitfalls that many first world countries continue to grapple with a concept that leaves large numbers of the most vulnerable uninsured, and unable to access health care. In fact, it is to be noted that such arrangements are generally known to result in windfall profits for a few multinational corporations and their associates, while leaving millions (in our case it would be thousands) without the desired health services. It is instructive that despite all the noise, the UWP has never seriously pursued the very policy which they have so loudly repeated over the years. There is no evidence either in the Ministry of Health or in Cabinet papers that they ever did. You may recall that journalist Janeka Simon was unceremoniously ignored and “dissed” by then PM Chastanet for enquiring into his government’s stated intention to produce a white paper in this regard.
The other elements of this latest UWP ruse may be similarly deconstructed. This article has not even addressed the fact that many of these hairbrained policies propose to cut revenue streams while not addressing sources of increased revenue to fund the very schemes being advanced.
The more we go into the entrails of this “7 Policies to Save Saint Lucia”, it becomes increasingly apparent that this is simply a rehashing of old campaign platitudes and clichés aimed at misdirecting those of us whose memories are short. A party which has refused to come to grips with the recognition that there were egregious wrongs that it committed which led to their 15-2 thrashing at the polls, a party that seeks to maintain a foolish hubris with a head-in-the-sand leader who thinks that his “class” betrayed him, and that “pedigree” gives him the right to leadership, may finally come to the realisation that some not-so-cleverly-contrived slogans are no substitute for an honest engagement with the people.