DON’T expect the ruling People’s National Party (PNP) to join in a fight against garrison politics if the definition of garrison politics is a set of people consistently voting a particular way.

That’s the word from PNP campaign spokesman Delano Franklyn when asked by the Jamaica Observer at a press briefing Wednesday to respond to Opposition leader Andrew Holness’s comment that the Portia Simpson Miller-led party has no interest in ridding the country of garrison-style politics.

Franklyn said there are varying views on what is meant by garrison politics.

“Is garrison politics a situation where persons from a constituency have voted in a particular way over a period of time? And if it is so, would the party seek to stomp out that? No. Those persons have a right to exercise their views as they see fit and to vote as they see fit,” Franklyn said.

“Is garrison politics a kind of politics which encourages violence on the ground? If that is their interpretation of it, then the party would not only be against it, but the party would be doing everything that is possible to rid the country and to rid the politics of that kind of violence,” Franklyn added.

He said that significant advances have been made over time to rid the process of violence.

He said: “If you were to compare the politics of Jamaica in 2016 during an election campaign and the politics of Jamaica during a political campaign in the 1980s you will see the vast difference which has occurred over time. People are now free to express themselves.”

In a recent interview with the Observer Holness charged that the party isn’t interested in ridding Jamaica of garrison politics, which, he said, fosters underperformance by political representatives and stifles implementation of good policies.

Holness said he wrote to Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller in 2011 and made several calls for both parties to join hands in tackling the issue, but to no avail.

“I made a call to the prime minister to say let us walk in these areas. Let those garrison areas be exposed — I call them zones of exclusion. Let them be exposed to alternatives. Allow them to make their decision freely. Remove any form of enforcership that may exist,” Holness said.

One feature of garrisons, he said, is that it’s an area “where people vote in a binary way”, which is, they all vote in support of one political party or not. He said that by his count, the PNP has 12 such constituencies, which have been won over the past five elections by a 2,000-vote majority or more.

Garrison is an area in which criminal and political activities are tightly controlled by politically affiliated gang leaders. It has been published that historically, the political party that happened to be in power would use large-scale public housing projects to reward and geographically concentrate their supporters in garrison communities.