OPPOSITION Leader Andrew Holness says the decent thing for Minister of Education Ronald Thwaites to do, if he disagrees with the conditions under which the Government has imposed a 16.5 per cent GCT on basic food items, would be to resign.

“It is not sufficient to put on your clergy collar and speak with your clergy hat and decry your Government and separate yourself from the decision. It is not enough and nobody is fooled by that,” Holness told a press briefing at the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP) headquarters in Kingston, yesterday.

Holness said that there is a fundamental principle of collective responsibility within any Cabinet, and if any member of the Cabinet felt strongly enough that a principle is flawed, then he should do the decent thing and resign.

“If you think that the principle is flawed, then you must resign,” Holness said.

The Opposition leader said that it is questionable whether there was agreement on the tax measures within the Cabinet, and that Thwaites’ behaviour was further evidence of Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller’s inability to unite members of the executive around Government’s policy decisions.

“One wonders who is in charge of the Government,” he commented, noting that Thwaites’ view on the GCT issue was similar to the JLP’s.

Concerns have been raised in the media recently about a statement by Thwaites, at a post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House last week Wednesday, that the General Consumption Tax (GCT), which was imposed on basic food items in the 2012/13 budget, was intolerable without a proper social security net to mitigate against the unbearable burden on the lowest quantile of the population.