Beckles questions funeral’s ‘clash’ with her Budget reply

Akash Sama­roo

Op­po­si­tion Leader Pen­ne­lope Beck­les is ques­tion­ing whether the tim­ing of Slinger “Mighty Spar­row” Fran­cis­co’s state-as­sist­ed fu­ner­al on Oc­to­ber 16 is an at­tempt by the Gov­ern­ment to di­vert pub­lic at­ten­tion from her re­sponse to the na­tion­al Bud­get, which is sched­uled for the same day.

While stop­ping short of di­rect­ly ac­cus­ing the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) ad­min­is­tra­tion of de­lib­er­ate­ly sched­ul­ing the fu­ner­al to co­in­cide with her par­lia­men­tary con­tri­bu­tion, Beck­les said, “One can on­ly hope that even the UNC, des­per­ate as they are, would not stoop so low as to use the death of a cul­tur­al icon to shore up their po­lit­i­cal fail­ure. Some things are big­ger than pol­i­tics, and ca­lyp­so and cul­ture should rank high among them. May Spar­row rest peace­ful­ly.”