U.D.P. marks 34th anniversary
With general elections less than six months away, politicians are using every available opportunity to canvass the electorate. But today, officials of the United Democratic Party took time out from campaigning to celebrate their thirty-fourth anniversary. According to the party’s website, on September twenty-seventh 1973, three entities: the People’s Development Movement, the National Independence Party and the Liberal Party joined forces to form the U.D.P. This afternoon, Opposition Leader Dean Barrow told us that the party is commemorating the milestone by reflecting on the past and planning for the future.
Dean Barrow, UDP Party Leader
“We are thankful that there is such a good legacy that we can point to with respect to this party. When we come into the contemporary era, we are very grateful to your supporters for having persevered, in 1998 after we’d had our second term in government. We lost terribly at the polls and it’s been a period of reconstruction since then. But our core supporters have never deserted us and so to them especially we say thank you, while we say welcome to the others now that have come to join the ranks of a party that we feel we can all be proud of. In terms of the electorate generally, just to indicate that we are of course focussed on trying to win the next general elections, focused on trying to convince them, the electorate that we not only will win but that we deserve to win and that we will be worthy of the trust that we fully expect them to place in us. So there’s something for everybody in terms of this particular birthday.”
“I still think that we could do more to operate seamlessly as one nation-wide party. There is still a little bit of fragmentation in terms of perhaps people in individual areas doing their one thing and that has to be one of our primary goals, to ensure that we really function as a fully integrated unit and that the leadership, the entire leadership of the party is at all times aware of and in control of what is happening throughout the country in respect to the party. In terms of things like our newspaper and our radio station, we are very happy that those are established. I think we have to begin looking to the time when we can acquire our own television signal, that’s certainly one of the things that I’m thinking of. We are in terms of those, the party officials, we are making an effort to be sure that we are equipped and fully functional in a technological era but again there’s a little more that can be done. Those are the sorts of nut and bolts things that I believe we have to be concentrating on in the immediate future, but of course, job one is winning the next general election.”
Coincidentally, the People’s United Party is also celebrating its anniversary this week. On Saturday, the twenty-ninth of September, the party will mark its fifty-seventh year as a political organisation.
