With the next general election constitutionally due less than two years away, the Opposition Members in the House, under the leadership of the Honourable Cora Richardson-Hodge of the Anguilla United Front Party, are taking whatever measures they can to show the populace that the current Government betrayed their trust when it enforced the GST, even though it had promised during the 2020 political campaign that it would not be implemented.
And though it may seem as if conversations regarding the GST is like beating a proverbial dead horse, during the weekly radio programme “Just the Facts”, on Monday 10th July, 2023, Mrs. Richardson-Hodge was quite vocal in declaring that it was on the premise of “No GST” that the current Government was voted into office.
“The fact is that this government campaigned against GST,” she said. “That became one of the main planks of their campaign platform. And I would dare say that it became one of the primary reasons why this Government was voted in. The reality is that during the 2020 political campaign, this APM Government demonized GST, in whatever form it might have been, while the Anguilla United Front (AUF) was still in office.”
“When the AUF was in office,” she reflected, “we were looking at bringing on the tax in phases. We would have tested how it would work and determined whether or not it would fit in [with] the form that it was in at the time. At that time, we had not even discussed what the percentage was to be, and we had no discussion on the GST structure at all. What we went to consultation with however, was the Interim Goods Tax (IGT).”
She said that the IGT was implemented in 2019 and it was to be then followed by the phased approach of GST. “But this Government [which was elected in 2020] continues to say that when they got in there they met …. documentation for the GST,” she said. “But no! It was just a draft document. And it had never gone to Executive Council. Several times I have said to this government that I need them to produce evidence to show that the GST tax that they implemented went to Executive Council when we were in office, but they can bring nothing to the fore.”
Co-host for the programme, Mr. Cardigan Connor said: “This government campaigned on the promise that it will [not] be introducing GST as a burden to the people. They said the British suggested that they should find an alternative to the GST that would garner sufficient revenues. But it was convenient for them to impose the GST without having any comprehension as to what the GST was about, or what the proposal of phases was all about.”
He said that the Government has used the excuse that the GST document (a draft) was already there, left in place by [the] previous administration. Whether a document on GST was there or not, he said that they campaigned on the promise that they were not going to impose it, but still they did. “The key then,” he said, “is that if they could blame the previous Government for it, then it would take the pressure off the APM and apply the blame on the AUF.”
“Yes, any consultant can place any draft document in front of a Government. It is up to that Government, at the end of the day, to make a decision. So, if they met a draft document that has not been approved by the Executive Council nor the House of Assembly, there would have been no obligation for them to take it forward.”
