The government’s Chief of Staff Lionel “Max” Hurst is of the opinion that the slate of candidates unveiled by the United Progressive Party (UPP) on Sunday will cause the party more harm than good.
Hurst said people tend to vote for candidates with whom they are familiar.
He said of the UPP’s 16 candidates, four are known in the political arena and the other 12 are virtually unknown to the large majority of Antiguans and Barbudans, except for Dr Cortwright Marshall, who has run on the ACLM (African Caribbean Liberation Movement) ticket before.
Hurst also opined that the newly formed political party , the Democratic National Alliance of Joanne Massiah, will take votes away from the UPP, giving the Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party (ABLP) an even greater advantage at the polls.
“But by and large the others are newcomers and I think that that spells disaster for the United Progressive Party, plus it has to fight against the new political party that has been launched by Joanne Massiah, which means that she will be taking a lot of their votes away and therefore putting the Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party in a better position than it would have normally been, so we will see how it works out, but I think this is as a result of the failure of Mr (Harold) Lovell’s leadership,” Hurst said on radio this morning.
According to Hurst, Lovell should have found a way to work things out with Joanne Massiah following the fallout after the UPP leadership race.
Hurst said it’s not a matter of taking chances when you are offering people to run the biggest business in Antigua and Barbuda, the government.
“The government is the biggest business and you don’t fool around with that.”
He said also that the candidates put forward yesterday don’t have the moral standings of those put forward by the Labour Party in 2014, adding that they also have no experience in government.
“Most people want to know what record one brings and it is the record which will determine in large part how you go forward, and some of them don’t have much shiny records,” Hurst noted.
