Former Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) Member of Parliament for Exuma, Philip Smith, chastising the party he once represented, stating that the party needs to be re-democratized.

“We need to restructure our branches, we need to re-democratize the entire organization, reconnect on a personal basis with those many thousands of people who still want what we called for in our core values in the organization,” Mr. Smith said.

Appearing as a guest on Love 97’s Issues of the Day, yesterday, Mr. Smith made his remarks during the voting process to elect officers to the party.

Mr. Smith told the show’s host, Mr. Wendall Jones that the party needs to get back to basics, the foundation on which they were formed on.

“Back to that very simple premise, that politics is about people and everything exists to serve people and not the other way around,” he said.

Mr. Smith alluded to the fact that the PLP politicians lost sight of what they were supposed to be doing for the people, but rather putting their own interests first.

“Unfortunately, when people are searching for wealth they start to think of people as commodity to serve the growth and development of wealth and not recognizing or failing to recognize or ceasing to recognize that when wealth serves the interest of people it is good ,but when it denigrates people, when it forces people to live in poverty it is bad,” Mr. Smith said.

When asked if his statement of re-democratizing meant that he was unhappy with the quality of the party’s democracy, Mr. Smith emphatically affirmed.

“That is true! Yes! We became, over the recent years, a centralized organization.

“When we were at our best, we were an organization that existed in its core in our communities throughout the country small and large.

“We had branches all over this country when people had an opportunity to voice their view within their community, believing and in reality that that voice making its way up to the leadership, and the leadership recognizing that they had a responsibility to maintain contact with those many, many organizations out there.

Mr. Smith said that when you get to the point of bringing anything and everything into the core of the party, perspectives change.

“When you centralize things, when you bring everything into the core you begin to develop a situation where politicians are talking at people, not listening to what people are saying and responding to that.

“That is what we need to get back to,” Mr. Smith said.

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