UPP not into vote buying

UNITED Progressive Party (UPP) leader Lynette Eastmond all but suggested that vote-buying and selling were entrenched in Barbados politics.

However, she told supporters in no uncertain terms that she will not engage in such when the bell is sounded for general elections due next year.

“I have no intention in seeking to buy any vote in the next election. I have no intention. Buying votes is against the law. Receiving bribes is against the law. I have no intention of anybody seeing me jukking $200 at anybody and the next thing you know you see me with my hands behind my back going in a prison van,” she said, while addressing a crowd at a meeting to introduce her candidate for St Michael North, Maria Phillips, in Eden Lodge on Sunday evening.

Eastmond, who previously served as a senator under the Owen Arthur-led Barbados Labour Party government, claimed that while she or any member of her party would be charged for the crime, she queried why no one has ever been brought before the courts for the offence.

“People have seen them committing the offense of bribing the electorate and for some reason they have never been arrested and they have never been charged.

“So at the beginning of every election in Barbados you have a crew of people who say that they want one person or another to be in Parliament and it starts out by breaking every single election law that you can think of and then they look at young people and tell them that they are bad. . . .

“I am not going to do it because you are not going to see me in the newspaper handcuffed even though you know that there are other people who for years have been doing it and you never see them get locked up. I am not going to be one because my luck is not your luck your luck is not mine,” she posited.