Adderley looks back at PLP beginnings

By TAMARA McKENZIE Guardian Staff Reporter

As the Progressive Liberal Party begins its 48th convention, a staunch supporter says it cannot survive without its grassroots supporters, but those individuals cannot win it an election by themselves.

"The PLP has got to turn itself into a broader coalition of people," said Paul L. Adderley, a former attorney general, minister of education and minister of finance who has been a PLP member since 1962.

"This is why they won the last election. The PLP was able to hold on to PLP support and added a significant number of the growing middle class in The Bahamas, the upwardly mobile men and women in the country today and that is what makes the PLP today."

Mr. Adderley spoke at his law office on Frederick Street, where he recalled the party's struggles, triumphs and what it now needs to keep afloat.

He said the PLP started with the so-called grassroots, but there are not many "legitimate" grassroots people in The Bahamas today.

More than 50 per cent of the electorate, he said, are people 25 and under and there is a increasing number of middle-class people who don't regard themselves as grassroots anymore.

The culture of the PLP is "unlike anything or any other party" ever formed in The Bahamas, he said.

"Between 1992 and today, the culture of the party has held it together and there are PLP supporters who will die for the party."

Forming the PLP

Mr. Adderley said the idea of forming the party, initially came from two men, Cyril Stevenson and Bill Cartwright, who approached H. M. Taylor (a former governor general) and asked him whether he was prepared to join them and form a political party that would later be known as the PLP. The formation of this party he said, was in 1953, and was mainly generated after the outcome of the 1949 election.

"Why 1953? Well, 1949 was very much a watershed year for the Bay Street Boys and they also changed their leadership as well. They conducted the most ruthless political campaign ever happening in the Bahamian history in the 1949 election."

"This galvanised opposition of all kinds to them. There had been some feeble attempts at the formation of political parties in the 19th century (The Afro Bahamian League in the 1880s, the ballot box party in the 1920s. There was also a strong Garveyite movement in the 1920s, but this was the first attempt that anybody made in 1953, which was generated by the way in which the 1949 election was conducted."

At the time, Mr. Adderley said the Bay Street Boys, then led by the late Sir Stafford Sands, Roy Solomon, Bobby Symonette and John Bethel, "were on the far right wing of any political party anywhere in the world" and at that time went from one end of Bay Street to the next in an effort to defeat those black candidates.

The former attorney general said the Progressive Liberal Party was formed as a reaction to the "excesses of the white-led Bay Street Boys" in 1953. The men, he said, succeeded in dividing the races more than ever before.

"Their attitude and their message of campaigning and their attitude toward everything else in The Bahamas, says, it (their formation) was worse than anything else being perpetrated in The Bahamas, quite apart from the social aspects of discrimination of all kinds and in all areas, so hence the formation of the PLP," he said.

The existence of racism

"What has developed in The Bahamas since the PLP was formed, was a form of racism as opposed to racial discrimination," said Mr. Adderley.

"There are people who would like to believe that it does not exist and nothing has happened, but this is not so. You deceive yourself if you believe there is no such a thing as racism that is still in The Bahamas."

Mr. Adderley said he did not object to the PLP using race in its early years, as "nobody played the race card more carefully and subtly than the white leadership."

"Yes, the PLP used race, but as a reaction to an infinitely more successful racism practiced by the white leadership at the time."

Mr. Adderley said The Bahamas is still fighting over race and many say it will not be completely eliminated.

"We have not successfully dealt with it so far, because there are too many people who are in a position to know better and don't want to talk about it honestly."

Who supports whom?

According to Mr. Adderley, the white political supporters of The Bahamas have always and still remain supporters of the opposition, which is not only FNM, but any party that opposes the PLP.

"It happens to be the Free National Movement now. It was the UBP, then the free PLP, but this is unfortunately what we have in politics today and any party that opposes the PLP, the majority of white people will support that party," Mr. Adderley said.

Money and politics

In its early days, the PLP was a party operating without money and this was significant, Mr. Adderley recalled. He said the extent to which money is now introduced in politics is "obscene" compared to what it was like in 1953, 1954, and 1955. Back then, the Bay Street Boys, he said, always had more money than the PLP and still do today.

"The use of money in elections and the patronage of money is not a creation of the PLP, but the PLP's 50-year legacy is bound to be the replacement of the black Bahamian in positions and for everybody, the creation of opportunity for every Bahamian, black and white."

Mr. Adderley said there are white people who were given more of an opportunity to do business under the PLP's governance and they used such opportunities successfully. On the other hand, he said there are people who could not become what they are under the "old regime" in The Bahamas.

The old and new PLP

"The leadership of the PLP in my day came predominately from lawyers educated in Britain who knew what the outside world was like, who understood to a very extent, the colonial problems in the world," said Mr. Adderley.

"We understood that The Bahamas was a small fish in a great big pond of decolonisation which was taking place in the British Empire."

Mr. Adderley says what the PLP and other political parties have today is a large number of people who do not have an educational background in the system of government. It has nothing to do with "pure politics" he said, but with the governance system and how civil servants and ministers ought to operate."

"With both parties, it's a learning experience that people have to go through and it's unfair to compare them to my generation of people who were schooled and trained," he said.

Posted: Monday November 17, 2003

© 2003 The Nassau Guardian