Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Kerrie Symmonds has strongly rejected claims by the Opposition Democratic Labour Party (DLP) that unemployment figures are higher than the government has stated.
Speaking in the House of Assembly on Tuesday, during debate on the Merchant Shipping Bill 2024, the senior minister took Opposition Leader Ralph Thorne to task for his inaccurate comments on the rate of joblessness.
He told the Lower House that it was his duty to defend the administration against “false claims that unemployment has reached its highest levels” or language that characterised unemployment as being at “an unprecedentedly high level”.
Directing his comments to the Christ Church South MP, Symmonds said: “What you are not entitled to is to create your own facts. And the Leader of the Opposition cannot be heard to say . . . that this country has seen its highest level of unemployment, unprecedentedly high unemployment when unemployment for the first quarter of this year was at the record low level of 6.9 per cent and crept up in the second quarter to 7.7 per cent – and to the best of our knowledge, information and belief, has gotten no higher.”
The St James Central MP said the Barbados Statistical Services data would provide the facts of unemployment in this country, as he called on members of the media to use that information to set the record straight.
“There is a point in time when journalists in this country . . . cannot be reducing themselves to what is called a form of amanuensis, that you are a mere scribe, but that you must, of a moral duty if nothing else, feel an urge to intervene and to say ‘this is the record, the public record, available for any Barbadian who is interested not in his own mythology but in truth and in fact’,” Symmonds contended. (IMC1)
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