PNP has no inherent right to exist

POLITICAL PARTIES have no inherent right to exist, or thrive. Indeed, even formerly great ones sometimes collapse, or merely putter along shadows of their former selves. Which is what happened to Britain’s Liberal Party, the great institution of the 19th and early 20th century that produced such towering figures as William Ewart Gladstone, Herbert Henry Asquith and David Lloyd George.

Today, the party, or the struggling remnants thereof, is one half of the Liberal Democrats (Lib-Dems), the party created when the Liberals and the Social Democrat Party merged in 1988. The Lib-Dems are yet to really fire the imaginations of the British electorate, although it sporadically shows signs of making breakthroughs, only to falter soon after.

We commend this tit bit of history to the brass of Jamaica’s People’s National Party (PNP), who, riven by mistrust of each other, and apparently incapable of coalescing around the leader, have fallen into a new round of squabbling over how key posts in the party should be shared among its factions. Should the PNP continue this drift, voters may well become fed up and move on from it. That – should another strong party not emerge – would be bad for Jamaica’s democracy. It would leave an almost unchallenged path to government and governance to the Jamaica Labour Party, which now holds office.

INTERNAL SQUABBLES

A formerly left of centre party that has drifted rightward in recent decades, the PNP is not unaccustomed to internal squabbles and factional fights, but rarely since its ideological battles of the 1970s have the disagreements been so protracted, intense or virulent. Wounds which were opened up since the 2006 election for a president to succeed P. J. Patterson have lingered since then, but were scraped raw by the brutal 2020 battle for leadership when Peter Bunting challenged the incumbent, Dr Peter Phillips.

Dr Phillips survived narrowly. He, however, resigned a year later after the party took a drubbing in elections. Many of Dr Phillips’ associates blamed the extent of the loss on the internal contest and the fact, as they claim, that the PNP had been weakened even before the challenge by activities to undermine the leader. It would hardly have assuaged Dr Phillips’s supporters that his successor, Mark Golding, is a close ally and friend of Peter Bunting, and was Mr Bunting’s campaign chairman. Further, Mr Bunting has emerged as Mark Golding’s chief of staff.

It is out of this cauldron of instability and distrust that the PNP’s officers, at the end of May, issued a declaration of their “common commitment to work together” on the party’s mission of building equality and social justice. There was more, the group insisted, that united than divided them.

We wished the PNP well. But despite the lauded efforts of the party’s unity committee, chaired by one of its grandees Maxine Henry Wilson, this newspaper saw no substantial diminution of the distrust among the PNP factions. All sides were constantly peering over their shoulders, anticipating the dagger of the other. As we noted then, while daggers may have been buried, the protagonists could quickly recover them.

It took merely 46 days for the papered-over cracks to re-emerge, with last weekend’s resignation of three vice presidents – Wykham Mcneill, Damion Crawford and Mikael Phillips – as well as the party’s chairman, Phillip Paulwell. Mr Phillips, a son of the former president, also withdrew his nomination for re-election at the party’s conference in September.

SABOTAGED

The quartet claims that negotiations for consensus on the four persons for the vice-president positions, to avoid a divisive internal campaign, was being sabotaged so as “to horde the available positions in line with previous public statements made by the leader, who pronounced a lack of trust for persons who did not support him in his campaign leadership and his preference to surround himself with only individuals who overtly endorsed his candidacy”.

Apparently, the group felt that people who were putting themselves up as candidates, outside of the consensus negotiations, which had become deadlocked, were doing so with more than tacit support from Mark Golding’s circle.

The withdrawal of the four may indeed leave the way open for Mr Golding and his supporters to have control of all the critical levers of the PNP. But it is not good for the party – even if the group does nothing that could be deemed overly and specifically undermining of his leadership. For, the optics of the development apart, this group is not without support in the party, which no leader would want to forfeit. And while Mr Golding may be able to call on others with superior political skills than the quartet’s, deploying them in the group’s areas of operations is likely to be politically fraught.

At the same time, there are real questions of whether the group’s action was designed to embarrass Mr Golding, and if one more round of talks might have done the trick. They have an obligation to provide a full and frank explanation of the decision and its timing.

The positive development from Mr Golding’s side, is his declaration of the willingness to work with the group and all factions of the PNP. Indeed, as this newspaper has consistently argued, while leaders sometimes have to be hard and decisive, the greater effort building consensus and fixing problems in times of crisis has to be theirs. The PNP’s situation demands extraordinary leadership. But we also remind the PNP that it has no inherent right to exist.