After two failed attempts, in 2006 and 2008, at wresting the leadership of the People’s National Party (PNP) from Portia Simpson Miller, Dr Peter Phillips withdrew from all party activities. But he is now back, having accepted an invitation to rejoin the executive of the PNP:

As you know in 2009 at the party Conference, I kind of indicated symbolically… I thought it was important that as a party we kind of had the wounds healed and move forward and accepting the leadership of the party. I was certainly pleased to have introduced her at the conference and I think a process is underway inside the party, a process of re-engagement of all of those who had for one reason or another moved to the margin of political activity.I would not say that the process is a complete one, but there is a process of moving on.

The process, first of all, entails dialogue between the different points of view within the party, a frank and straightforward and nevertheless amicable dialogue which helps deal with confidence and set the pace for resolving issues.

Secondly, it would entail the re-engagement of people who whether it is the level of constituency council, divisional council or executive council, who became disengaged at all levels, at the National Executive Council (NEC) right down to divisional council.

I think the party leader has done her bit and said her words of encouragement and I have also had meetings with various comrades and offered my encouragement of this process, and still more needs to be done. I certainly intend to try to have discussions with more of those persons who supported me to kind of encourage them to recognise that the particular circumstances of Jamaica now I think, are so dire that they don’t allow us the luxury of disengagement.

I think all citizens need to get engaged in civic life and those who have chosen political involvement need to answer the call for full patriotic engagement.

It is not a public relations exercise, I think we have to accept that different people will move at different paces in the process. Not everyone of the persons who supported me is agreed in the re-engagement process and not everyone who supported the party leader is necessarily going to be happy.

No more challenges. for now

But I think the vast majority certainly of the delegates on the ground are very pleased with this and the PNP supporters of the country, and the supporters of both the party leader and myself, so that there is a sincere process and we just need to give it time to find its way and increase the confidence with each step and move forward.

My personal relationship with the party leader is good. I don’t have any complaints. We exchange views, share thoughts, we have had discussions, there is no rancour that I see or feel at all. I think we recognise as I said before that there is an urgent need for the PNP to put the past contests behind us and to move forward and so there is no animosity.

Surprisingly, there were a lot of hard words between supporters rather than between us and all of that must be put in perspective and all of the persons where these frictions arose, all of those persons who might have been affected, might have had a longer history of co-operation and joint effort uniting them than the relatively short period of upset and division.

So I think there is a foundation that exist upon which they can build as they enter into this further new phase of activity.

Look at it this way, I think that whatever concerns we had about the party’s focus on nation-building and education in the party and our sense of urgency regarding the task of nation-building and the need for a more extensive vision for national development, all of those concerns we still have – concerns that motivate our political engagement.

But we have to face the fact that the delegates have spoken and therefore we can carry whatever view we have into the party council and continue to advocate for them and share our thoughts with other comrades and try to convince them and try to move on.

You can’t have effective dialogue in an atmosphere of separation and division so we need to continue to engage in that dialogue.

I have the honour of being asked to resume my seat on the executive and I have done so and I have also accepted to sit on other councils with the spokespersons and the officers and I will do that.

I don’t have any plans at this time to run for any office within the party. Apart from Member of Parliament for East Central St Andrew.

I am not saying that I am ruling out any plans but my whole new engagement is more concerned with being an effective political force, my ability to do that, my influence among comrades and more generally the populace is not directly related to a particular office that I hold.

Peter says Gov’t learning curve too long

DR Peter Phillips tackles the economic problems besetting the Jamaican economy and identifies where the Government could find $90 billion. He also contends the Government is taking too long to learn:

I think that we have to find a way to set our public finances right. There are some very difficult decisions that have to be taken but that will help reduce our deficit.

I think that the whole condition and extent of employment in the public sector, some of which have been addressed by the prime minister, might have to be confronted. I think that the challenge of bringing about the contributory pension schemes within the public sector, might be a matter that will end up overtime saving about $90 billion, because we could use this to be a non-contributory pension scheme.

We will have to look at a range of activities and enterprises. We will have to find a way to make our budget exercises and responsibilities of the Standing Finance Committee real in the sense that we have a real and genuine exercise which has the possibility of reordering some of our expenditures.

We are not suicidal as a country

I don’t believe we are suicidal as a country. If when the realisation comes about that the only way forward is to do some of these tough things; and when those who lead recognise the responsibility not just to talk, but to act in accordance with their words; when we start setting examples of balance, of honesty and integrity so that this great sense of injustice that the average person feels that the scales are not really balanced – that some people get highly rewarded even when they don’t demonstrate value for any reward while other people are the only ones being asked to pay the price; when they feel that taxes are actually going to be collected from everyone and not just those who are caught in the PAYE trap, so to speak; then I think that you will get a greater degree of trust and a greater collective spirit being exercised by the Jamaican people as a whole.

Change is not going to be painless

The challenges to change the path, to change the way we have practised and the way we have administered this country, is not going to be a painless change. You can’t give a signal that you are against criminality but fail to act when one of your own is affected and believe that you will continue to enjoy the trust of the country.

The truth is, it is not of the making of one administration, but those who are currently leading the country has to accept a greater share of the responsibility to help redress this deep-seated distrust, which has a sound basis because the truth is Jamaican society still bears tremendous spheres of inequalities.

There is still the case that one set of schools (traditional high) delivers a tolerable level of education and there are other schools (non-traditional high) that are absolutely intolerable in terms of the kind of education that you get.

That is why people struggle so hard to give their children a chance to go to one of the traditional high schools but the real challenge is to change this condition of whereby 60-plus close to 70 per cent of our children leave school without any qualification and start living a life of hopelessness.

Where the PNP fell short

I recognise and not just since being out of power, that we in the PNP needed to evaluate as a party, as an opposition and as a country, our own years of stewardship. A lot was accomplished but I think in many of these fundamental respects, while there was some forward movement in some areas, such as in opening up of educational opportunities, I think fundamentally where the economy was concerned we didn’t really achieve enough in terms of opening up enough security levels and the rate of growth; that we need to ask ourselves – why despite the massive inflows of foreign investments what were the impediments to faster and more extensive growth of the economy.

Certainly, in relation to crime and security and social conditions, I don’t think we got to the heart of it. While I think we made some gains in terms of some of the onslaught on druggists and cocaine vendors and hard core criminal organisations which existed, we certainly didn’t succeed in dismantling all organised crime. And organised crime is still too great an element of Jamaican reality.

But having said all of that, I think that one of the opportunities

that you are presented with in opposition is being pulled away from the day-to-day administration of getting a ministry to run, getting laws passed through Parliament, and working towards phases of drafting presentation; interfacing with your partners, domestic and foreign, is that you have more of a chance for evaluation and reflection.

I certainly have taken the opportunity to embark upon that reflection, and there is much more that needs to be done and part of what I’ve been trying to do otherwise is to help stimulate a national debate, which is on the way but which will need as many voices as it can have in an actual dialogue.

JLP taking too long to learn

The JLP learning curve seems to have been particularly long, and surprisingly long, given the extent of time that they have had. I will point to things like the confusion in their tax packages.A lot of confusion arose in the budget last year and this year with the gas tax we were told that monies have not been handed over. We were told that there were accounting errors and then even in this recent thing with the travel tax and the obvious lack of preparation, we have seen an administration that is very unprepared.

Another indication of it is the rapid turn over in some of the key areas, finance being the prime one, the change of the Financial Secretary, replacing one with someone whom they had to change again. You can’t absolve yourself from the fact that the first decision was one of your own making.

We have seen at the ministerial level some rapid changes. Security is an example. We will put aside the illness of the first Minister (Derrick Smith). However, we brought in someone who was rapidly moved out of the force (Col Trevor MacMillan) and all of these don’t give a sense of a steady hand running the ship. Admittedly, the ship is in stormy waters and has been. One thing I would have said is that the PNP has had experience with the storms that can be generated in the external global economic environment and was able to find its way through it and would have been in a better position in terms of carrying through some of the decisions that have been taken.

For example, with this sugar divestment exercise, I’m still not clear on what is happening. The first step to divest the sugar would be engagement with this Brazilian company, but which seems to have been a wrong-footed endeavour.

We still have not heard what is the situation with Air Jamaica even though another deadline has been given. There are some decisions that have been postponed for too long, some urgent challenges to simply face the fact that we cannot as a country sustain our expenditure purely on the basis of borrowing or borrow to the extent that we are now borrowing or be sustained in the extent of this global crisis.

We certainly need to move the debate a little bit out of this ‘us and them’ and be collective. What are we as a country going to do to move us to a better place?

We can’t sustain 30 years of slow or no growth. We can’t continue after 47 years with an educational system that is still leaving more than half of the people behind. We can’t make our way in a world economic environment if two-thirds of your labour force is really existing with basic training and skill. We can’t maintain public finances where 60 per cent of our revenue goes for debt and another 25 per cent go for wages and salaries.

All of that is a recipe for disaster.