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From the Publisher

PublisherFrom the Publisher

In the last ten or twelve years, the attorney Godfrey Smith, who is generally considered to be one of Lord Michael Ashcroft’s assets, has written well-researched political biographies of Belize’s Rt. Hon. George Price, Jamaica’s Michael Manley, and Grenada’s Maurice Bishop.
If we are to gain any understanding of what has happened in Belize City since the 1960s, however, we must know some of the important facts about the late Hon. Philip Stanley Wilberforce Goldson.

In 1951, Goldson and another PUP leader, Leigh Richardson, served nine months in Her Majesty’s Prison on sedition charges brought by the colonial authorities in British Honduras.
In the mid-1940s, Mr. Price, who was the business magnate Bob Turton’s personal secretary, had been pushed into Belize City politics by Turton.

When the People’s United Party (PUP) was formed in September of 1950 after the British devalued the British Honduras dollar in December of 1949, some of the leading PUP personalities included Price, Goldson, Richardson, Johnny Smith, Herman Jex, Nick Pollard, and so on.

An interesting aspect of PUP history is that Mr. Price did not become PUP leader until 1956, after his original sponsor and employer, Bob Turton, had died in 1955. My father has expressed the opinion that Turton may have preferred Leigh Richardson as leader because Richardson would do his bidding.

In any case, the year after Turton’s death, Richardson and Goldson lost a power struggle with Mr. Price and left the PUP.

Richardson and Goldson formed the Honduran Independence Party (HIP), which contested the 1957 national election. After the HIP’s defeat, Richardson went into exile in Trinidad, where he worked as a journalist.

Goldson ended up in control of THE BELIZE BILLBOARD, which had been the PUP newspaper. This is very important to appreciate, because control of the BILLBOARD meant that Mr. Philip was financially independent. In its peak years, from 1956 to 1966, say, the BILLBOARD was selling 4,000 newspapers daily (except for Saturday) and 7,000 on Sundays. Mr. Goldson was so financially independent that he did not run in the 1961 general election, after his HIP had joined with the National Party (NP) to form the National Independence Party (NIP) in 1958, and he paid for his wife, Hadie, to go to London to study law from 1961 to 1965. (The NIP candidate in the Albert constituency in 1961 was Mrs. Floss Casasola.)

The BILLBOARD used the old-fashioned lead type, which could be used over and over. It was a very profitable operation. So that, if someone wanted to attack Mr. Goldson financially/politically, it would be a logical thing for that entity to seek to find a way to undermine or compete with the BILLBOARD.

The decision by Mr. Goldson in 1966 to expose Bethuel Webster’s Proposals brought him into direct conflict with the United States State Department. Webster was a New York attorney who had been chosen by Washington to mediate in the dispute between Great Britain and Guatemala over Belize. If Webster’s Proposals had been accepted, essentially making Belize a satellite state of Guatemala’s, Belize would have then moved on to political independence in the late 1960s (after achieving self-government in 1964). Mr. Goldson’s courageous decision, although he had been sworn to secrecy, to reveal Webster’s Proposals to the people of Belize, messed up State’s plans.

So that, the sudden appearance of THE CHAMBER REPORTER in 1967, the year after the Thirteen Proposals, printing with modern offset technology, was a direct business attack on Mr. Goldson and his political independence.

Essentially, that attack ended up succeeding. Early in 1972, Mr. Goldson shut down the BILLBOARD and went to London to study law. His wife took their six children to Brooklyn, where she worked as a law clerk. In 1974, Mr. Goldson was officially replaced as Leader of the Opposition by Dean Lindo. The new United Democratic Party (UDP), formed in 1973 while Mr. Goldson was in London, was a business-oriented party, financed by Santiago Castillo and Ismael Gomez.

In 1984, Barry Bowen became Dean Barrow’s financier. Around the same time, or perhaps previously, Michael Finnegan had become a Bowen loyalist.

The UDP was a neoliberal political party, and quite different from the NIP, which had been dominated by Mr. Goldson. Mr. Goldson came out of a trade union background, and he was very much opposed to the Guatemalan claim to Belize. There is a history here which needs to be told if we are to understand the sociological collapse of what we knew as Belize City back then.

Power to the people.

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