PRIME MINISTER the Rt Hon Freundel Stuart is in receipt of the “Barbados at 50: A National Values Assessment 2016”, but the public will have to wait until September 26 to hear the official findings of the document.
The report was officially handed over to Prime Minister Stuart by Dr. Don Marshall, Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institution for Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) of the University of the West Indies, during an evening of appreciation held at Ilaro Court for persons who contributed to the successful staging of Barbados’ Golden Jubilee celebrations last year.
Dr. Marshall, while giving a sneak peek at the findings of his team of researchers, said: “There is strong evidence that we are driven to an American manner of society, but there is also a hankering for a return to some idea of a politics of the common good.
“The common good and looking out for your brother and sister – those values, oriented around the promotion of the common good, seemed to trump the crass individualism that is revealed in the comments written in the interviews that we had with persons.”
While commending government for reaching out to the university, without any form of interference to conduct the study, he said the aim of the study was to provide baseline data which showed where Barbados is 50 years after independence.
He noted that the study was rooted in the critical questions posed by the Prime Minister during the launch of the celebrations on January 6, 2016. Dr. Marshall said the team readily accepted the challenge and conducted research which has provided a scientific basis upon which one can identify those values or features of “Barbadiana” life that Barbadians abroad have identified as critical and conversely those aspects of the country’s value system which ought to be discarded.
The Prime Minister while thanking SALISES said the study is not just for academic reasons, but for purposes of policy making and for charting a future for the country. “Unless a country knows where it has come from and where it is, it cannot know with any confidence where it is going.”
Noting that Barbados has changed significantly over the years, Prime Minister Stuart said he is not surprised to hear that there is a tendency towards an American value system, adding that this was the goal of a former Prime Minister, to make Barbados the New York of the Caribbean.
He told those in attendance that Barbados must be guided by some core beliefs and values. “A society is ultimately held together by shared values. And we have to have some broad agreement, it is not going to be a total consensus... that certain things are right and certain things are wrong; certain things are good and certain things are bad; certain things are fair, certain things are unfair, certain things are just, certain things are just and unjust ... We are not going to get perfection in all of this, but there has to be some shared understanding in all of these things,” it was also pointed out.
Saying that he detects that there is some uncertainty as to “where we are and what we believe” he acknowledged that the Barbados of 50 years ago will never return. “Too much has happened over the past 50 years for us to reconstruct that Barbados, material foundations have changed.”
“Therefore we are not casting a nostalgic glance into the past and trying to reconstruct the old Barbados because again, there wasn’t everything good about the old Barbados either. What we want to do is create a relevant Barbados that is inclusive and a Barbados in which every man, woman and child can feel that he or she has a chance to make what he or she believes,” he said. (JH)