Beckles: Bill ‘worse than the State of Emergency’

Op­po­si­tion Leader Pen­ne­lope Beck­les has ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of seek­ing to make it hard­er for the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment to hold po­lit­i­cal meet­ings ahead of next year’s lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tions, warn­ing that the Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Bill could be used against them.

Ad­dress­ing par­ty sup­port­ers out­side Bal­isi­er House yes­ter­day, Beck­les urged the PNM to pre­pare for the polls while scru­ti­n­is­ing the Gov­ern­ment’s pro­posed se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures, which she de­scribed as “worse than the state of emer­gency”.

“The PNM, get your­self ready. Next year is lo­cal elec­tions. And they want to make it hard for us to have meet­ings,” she charged.

Beck­les ques­tioned the speed with which the Gov­ern­ment was pur­su­ing the leg­is­la­tion af­ter the end of the state of emer­gency, sug­gest­ing the tim­ing re­flect­ed a de­lib­er­ate ef­fort to main­tain ex­tra­or­di­nary pow­ers.

“That is not by ac­ci­dent,” she said. “And as I said last night, this new bill is worse, worse than the state of emer­gency.”

She al­so al­leged that cit­i­zens’ tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions were be­ing mon­i­tored and warned sup­port­ers to ex­er­cise cau­tion when post­ing on so­cial me­dia.

“Be care­ful what you say on your phone. Be care­ful what you’re do­ing on so­cial me­dia. They’re look­ing for any ex­cuse. Any ex­cuse to lock you up,” she claimed.

Her warn­ing came along­side a de­fence of sup­port­ers’ con­tri­bu­tions to­wards the con­struc­tion of the par­ty build­ing where they had gath­ered, as she re­ferred to court pro­ceed­ings and ques­tions about its fi­nanc­ing.

“They have us in court, they want to know how we build this. Many of you here con­tributed, the raf­fles, all those things to make sure that we have this struc­ture and the oth­er one that isn’t fin­ished,” she said.

Call­ing for sol­i­dar­i­ty, she de­clared: “If they touch one of us, they touch all of us.”

The PNM, she said, was cel­e­brat­ing its 70th an­niver­sary this year, and its abil­i­ty to mo­bilise sup­port­ers at short no­tice re­mained a source of strength.

Beck­les al­so point­ed to the Op­po­si­tion’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the par­lia­men­tary de­bate, say­ing every PNM MP had spo­ken on the bill.

“They were not pre­pared for it. They didn’t want all of us to speak,” she claimed. - Ot­to Car­ring­ton