Politics
In 1956, upon Saint Vincent and the Grenadines gaining increased autonomy, Joshua became chief minister. His PPP saw continued success in subsequent elections. Joshua supported the unsuccessful Federation of the West Indies. In 1964 Joshua discontinued support for the sugar growers, closing the Saint Vincent Sugar Mill as a result of steady losses which had happened for several years.
Joshua attended an initial conference of the Caribbean Food Crop Society held in Barbados to discuss alternative crops and techniques for better productivity for bananas and arrowroot. A misunderstanding of this sequence of circumstance and Vincentian history by American musician Eric von Schmidt became the basis for the hit song "Joshua Gone Barbados". In 1967 the PPP lost their parliamentary majority and Joshua was succeeded by Milton Cato, leader of the more moderate Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Labour Party. Joshua remained in parliament, but the PPP began to decline as the conservative New Democratic Party emerged as political competition. In 1979 the PPP lost all parliamentary representation, and the was party dissolved in 1984.
Read more about this topic: Ebenezer Joshua
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts. Their measures are half measures and makeshifts merely. They put off the day of settlement, and meanwhile the debt accumulates.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”
—George Washington (1732–1799)