For over 20 years the incompetent ULP regime has struggled and failed miserably to make SVG’s economy strong. They tinker with the economy, and fail to create prosperity. In 2007, Gonsalves stated, ‘it is difficult to live without grants’. Since then, SVG has been plunged into debt with billions of dollars of borrowing and very little revenue creation.
SVG Green Party has always perceived Gonsalves as a disappointing and weak leader. He has consistently shown a high propensity to use begging, borrowing and heavy taxation as the main components for supporting SVG’s fragile economy. The implication of this poor management of SVG’s economy has been the fueling of violent crime, high unemployment, increased poverty, and a growing despondency within SVG.
The main weaknesses of the ULP regime are the lack of innovation, failure to create sustainable sources of revenue, no capacity to implement projects successfully to create revenue and a continuous delusionary focus on the need for mass tourism.
Historically, mass tourism in the Caribbean is a big failure, in that, Caribbean countries that try to use mass tourism as the main engine of their economy are listed amongst the top 15 most indebted countries in the world.
Mass tourism is an illusionary economic component of the SVG economy. SVG does not have a massive amount of tourists coming to stay for holidays, so there is little revenue from mass tourism. Ask any taxi driver based at the airport and they will tell you that they are lucky to get one taxi passenger most days as few tourists come to stay in SVG. And, passengers arriving on cruise ships spend little money in SVG during the few hours that they come ashore.
Focusing on mass tourism is killing the SVG economy. Citizens of SVG deserve better.
The ULP regime is tinkering with SVG’s economy and just getting into greater debt in the process. They tinker here, tinker there, make minor adjustments to this, that and the other, but they still cannot create a strong, secure economy and prosperity for our people.
The prospect is bleak for the people of SVG as long as the ULP regime stays in government. People can only expect harder times, greater poverty, high unemployment, a substantial increase in the cost of living, higher taxes overall, and higher prices for water and electricity. To date, the weak ULP regime has not managed to stem the flow of gun crime and other violent crime.
For their time in office, they seem to have forgotten the unemployed. Even people with jobs are generally not better off, because the cost of living is rising rapidly. Food is more expensive and the cost of water and electricity has risen dramatically under the ULP regime, because they have failed to create sustainable sources of revenue, and rely on taxing the people heavily as a source of income.
In short, the ULP regime has overstayed its welcome. They tinker with the economy, and fail to create sustainable sources of revenue and prosperity for all our people. They lack a coherent plan for economy stability, instead producing budgets with fiscal deficits every year.
SVG Green Party
