PNP disunity could provide PM with options, says Smith

Saturday, November 07, 2009 8:32 PM

News

BY ERICA VIRTUE, Observer writer virtuee@jamaicaobserver.com

Monday, July 06, 2009

Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) deputy leader Derrick Smith, obviously energised by the public display of disunity rocking the Opposition People's National Party (PNP), yesterday told supporters to keep the ruling party's organisation in high gear.

Smith's exhortation suggested that the hierarchy of the JLP is probably weighing the option of calling general elections in the hope of capitalising on the fractiousness of the PNP and increasing the JLP's four-seat majority in the 60-seat Parliament which it won in the September 2007 general elections.

"Now, I can't read into the prime minister or the party leader's head," Smith told the JLP's Area Council 1 meeting at the Dunrobin Primary School in Kingston. "But, as a politician for 30 years, I know how politicians think. And the state of the PNP, the demoralised state of the PNP, could lead, might lead a party leader to look at some options and come to a decision that hopefully will not find us running from behind."

He said that several boundary changes are to come into effect shortly in the northern St Andrew constituencies, which will affect the municipal divisions, and he urged Labourites to keep the party's machinery oiled.

"We see that the great party - and I say great party because N W Manley's party was a great party - is disintegrating," Smith said of the PNP. "They are quarrelling with the current leadership, they quarrelling with the general secretary, and now the chairman. They quarrelling with themselves; very soon they going to be quarrelling with everybody, but
that is PNP business, so we going to leave them to quarrel amongst themselves.

"In the meantime, what have we got to do?" he asked. "We are a party in government, and it is a fact that a very high percentage of the leadership of the party, not only in the Corporate Area, but throughout the country, have now found themselves in senior office in government."

The prevailing conditions, Smith said, could cause the party organisation in constituencies to falter, and he urged Labourites to make sure that does not happen.

Since March this year, the PNP has lost two parliamentary by-elections ordered by the courts after it mounted challenges to the September 2007 results, based on the fact that the JLP candidates - Daryl Vaz in West Portland and Gregory Mair in North-East St Catherine - held dual citizenship at the time they were nominated.

The beatings have increased sniping in the PNP with the leader, Portia Simpson Miller and the general secretary, Peter Bunting, coming
under fire.

"There is now virtually no consensus on any issue in the party," one PNP insider told the Observer yesterday.

A senior PNP member, pointing to US President Barack Obama's description of Russian President Vladimir Putin as still having one foot in the Cold War era, said yesterday: "The feet of the entire PNP leadership are still in an outdated era."

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