"IT WOULD ONLY TAKE 100 days to destroy Barbados' economy."

Former Barbados Labour Party (BLP) representative for the City, Dame Billie Miller who is also the party's campaign manager, made this ominous statement on Thursday night in Weston, St James, referring to one of the Democratic Labour Party's (DLP) manifesto promises which speaks to the removal of VAT from building supplies of up to $400 000 within its first 100 days in office.

"I have been in this business a long time and I know you can destroy an economy in 100 days. But it will take one or perhaps two generations to rebuild and we know about that in the BLP because we've had to rebuild coming in the footsteps after the Dems in 1976.

"Remember that was the time of the first oil crisis and they had driven the economy into the ground. There have been oil crises since then; we are in one now but the BLP is handling it," she said.

She said if the economy was in such a bad state as the Opposition claimed, then how could it possibly do "all these wonderful things in the first 100 days?" which she pointed out, were mostly giveaways.

"They plan to giveaway the whole Treasury but the Treasury suppose to be nearly empty," said Dame Billie.

She said she detected a worrying trend in comments made by Opposition Leader David Thompson.

"I heard him say earlier on in the campaign when they refused to come back to Parliament, that don't matter what work we did in Parliament that when they win the Government, what they don't like they will repeal.

"My political antennae started to quiver right away. He is a lawyer as I am and repeal is a very serious word. It means you're going to recall, revoke, turn back. So it causes me now to think back about all the important pieces of legislation they did not support when they were sitting down in the House of Assembly.

"It causes me to think of so many things the BLP has done, not only in the past 13 years but things that go back to an earlier Administration under Tom Adams to which they did not give their support. It caused me to think about what he might want to repeal," said Dame Billie.

She said the BLP went to Parliament and put legislation in place so that never again in Barbados would a Government be able to cut anyone's salary the way the DLP did in the early 1990s.

She was concerned that this might be a piece of legislation they would repeal if they became the next Government, she said. (MR)