And "one united Belize" means no chest beating about the political implications of yesterday's referendum results. Many in the UDP see the comfortable majority of a "yes" vote as a political victory - but the Prime Minister stressed that it cannot be interpreted as that:...
Rt. Hon. Dean Barrow, Prime Minister
"The YES vote is not a victory for the United Democratic Party and the failure of the NO campaign is not a lost for the People's United Party. In the end of course politics had to get involved and that was inevitable. Ultimately if you're going to talk about mobilization so that no effort will be spared to have people turn out, to get out the vote to move people to the polls, it is only the political parties that are capable of that kind of mass mobilization. So to that extend it was always in the cards that the 2 political parties would have to get involved. But at the end of the day this was a decision for Belize and had the results been otherwise, I would have been here this afternoon congratulating the people of our country, but the fact is the vote was YES an emphatic YES. I am happy for that in particularly in the sense that there can be no doubt that the result is the will of the majority of the Belizean people."
"There are so many good takeaways from this result. Not least of which is the ability to big u, if you will, those Belizeans who are true blue PUP, but who publicly made clear that this issue was bigger than party politics and that they would stand against their party and for Belize. That is why I repeat that we cannot sully what is a people's victory by in any sense equating it with a UDP victory. That is my mind to do that would be to insult those outstanding citizens who went against their party in what they saw as the patriotic interest of Belize."
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