IF the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) did not have its gaze so fixed on coming elections it would realise that its rather puerile act of walking out of the Parliament on Tuesday over the United Kingdom prison offer runs counter to its position on bringing home the Jamaican pilot who was imprisoned in Qatar.

Moreover, the big mistake being made about British Prime Minister David Cameron’s announcement of the prison deal, is that it is being confused with the reparations debate. These are two distinctly separate issues. It is possible to have such a prison with or without reparation.

Given the fervour with which the Opposition — led by its foreign affairs spokesperson, Mr Edmund Bartlett — championed the cause of the Jamaican pilot who was jailed in Qatar on allegations of having sex with a teenager, and its insistence that the Jamaican Government should show more interest in the welfare of Jamaicans imprisoned overseas, we would have expected that bringing home Jamaican prisoners from Britain might be warmly welcomed.

In fact, Opposition Leader Andrew Holness pointed the Parliament to a British Government website which referred to a June 2007 bilateral agreement on the voluntary transfer of prisoner transfers to Jamaica. That agreement could not take effect because it was not ratified by the Jamaican Parliament under any of the two administrations.

While the British public has been pressuring their Government to send Jamaican prisoners home for financial reasons, successive Jamaican governments have stoutly refused to accept, largely because of deplorable prison conditions here and the absence of supporting legislation.

Jamaicans are said to be the third largest foreign contingent in British jails, accounting for 692 men and 45 women out of a total foreign prison population of 10,600, costing British taxpayers nearly £400 million a year, based on 2014 figures.

A more useful debate should be about whether it is in the best interest of Jamaica and the Jamaican prisoners to have such an agreement.

There is a view that it would be difficult to transfer prisoners without their consent, giving rise to the possibility of legal challenges on human rights grounds. Being transferred back to Jamaica would make things, like family visits, more difficult for those with British families, even if that works for those with their families in Jamaica.

National Security Minister Peter Bunting said on Tuesday that none of the laws which would need to be amended to facilitate the transfer had been changed.

So this prison debate might be much ado about nothing, at least for now. Unless, of course, those in support of reparation, including the Opposition, are deliberately trying to make it appear that the offer of a prison is in lieu of reparation. Note the use of the word ‘insult’ to describe Cameron’s announcement.

Did someone say “intellectual sleight-of-hand”?