IF the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) believes that it is any saint, it is only fooling itself. Its waste-of-time no-confidence motion Tuesday only managed to divert attention from the urgent national security task at hand.

The PNP can forget about salivating at the prospect of a Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) demolition at the next polls, on the basis that the ruling party is damaged beyond repair by the Tivoli Gardens explosion. Mrs Portia Simpson Miller’s PNP should not sit by and hope that the JLP alone will soak up the blame for decades of political nurturing of gunmen and thugs.

We don’t believe there is any right-thinking adult Jamaican who is unaware that the PNP has garrisons, where people vote for the other party at their own peril. Neither do we believe that there is any right-thinking adult Jamaican who is unaware that there are criminals with links to the PNP, the Klansman gang being only the most organised of them.

Both the JLP and PNP have a well-known history of links with criminals, some of whom served as enforcers and ‘protectors’ inside and outside the garrisons. The PNP is — to borrow from Miss Olivia ‘Babsie’ Grange in her characterisation of Mr Bruce Golding on the 1997 campaign trail — six months pregnant. There might be an argument about who is more pregnant, but that too would be a grand waste of time.

As the nation looks to grasp this opportunity to renew itself, there has to be a paradigm shift. It is no longer useful to swop one political party for the next, on the basis of the usual manifesto with nice-sounding platitudes that are forgotten the day after the elections.

We hope that, if the PNP is genuine about its support for the security forces’ offensive starting in Tivoli, it would by now have handed to the commissioner of police a list of names of the criminals who are hiding under its cloak. The party also needs to come out and say for all to hear that henceforth it will have nothing to do with criminals.

Political types have often described Jamaica as ‘PNP country’, going by the number of general elections won by the two major parties since Universal Adult Suffrage in 1944. If this is PNP country, the leadership of the party must share the Jamaican hope for a country where crime is down to tolerable levels, giving rise to unprecedented development.

What is needed of the PNP now is its well-known intellectual energy and the will to be part of the change which, by the way, has been forced not by pressure from the parties but from the people. Dr Peter Phillips has been articulating a way forward, but he seems too alone in the wilderness.

There is good reason for the absence of a groundswell of support for elections to remove the JLP, despite the widespread disaffection with the prime minister. Our people instinctively understand that nothing should distract us from consolidating the gains made by the security forces, at so great a sacrifice, might we add.

The next party that Jamaicans vote into office should be the one that has formulated and articulated the best policies and programmes to take us forward from this period.

We’ll see now how relevant the PNP is and whether it has anything to offer a nation that is so pregnant with possibilities.