MONTEGO BAY, St James — First-time Member of Parliament (MP) Heroy Clarke is ready to start the work in the development of St James Central, after his decisive general election day win over first time candidate Ashley-Ann Foster on Thursday.

The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) candidate, who turned around his close loss to the People’s National Party’s Lloyd B Smith in 2011, beat Foster by over 2,000 votes — 6932 to 4851 — after the preliminary count, and says he is ready to start working for everyone in the constituency.

The 11,783 votes that were polled represented just 42 per cent of registered voters in the constituency that was first contested in 2011, being carved from parts of St James North West and St James West Central when three additional seats were added to the 60 that were contested across the island.

“We ran the election on a JLP ticket and we won on a JLP ticket but as member of parliament, I am not a JLP member of parliament but the member of parliament for St James Central, which includes every single person that has an address and is registered in this constituency,” he told reporters, minutes after the 97 boxes were counted at the Electoral Office of Jamaica’s St James Central office on St Claver Avenue late Thursday night.

A tired looking but upbeat Clarke affirmed: “Therefore, I will not seek to represent only the JLP supporters, but also any other person that lives within the constituency.”

Despite being his first time as a member of parliament, Clarke is not new to representational politics, having served as a parish councillor, in the St James Parish Council and says he can’t do the job alone.

“I am calling on every civil society groups — the youth groups, citizens associations, neighbourhood watch and benevolent societies… every one, as we now have to build our constituency,” he said.

“It is not the community that defines you, it’s you who defines the society and therefore, we must aim to create a definition for St James Central and when we do it must be a positive one.”

The MP-elect was also well aware that it was not enough to win the election, but the work to build would start and involve everyone.

His first order of business after being sworn in he said was: “To emphasise and to advance on the unattached youth programme. We are losing our youth resource, we are losing it, and therefore speedily we must plug that hole as we are losing too much of our human resource through crime and our constituency is made up of 77 per cent informal communities and they are cultured in a certain way and, therefore, it is going to be a task of not just mine, but other agencies to ‘de-culturise’ them from that kind of thinking,” he said.

“To win the election was a hard fight” Clarke told the journalists, “but to maintain the win is going to be even harder and I am calling on everyone in the constituency to come on board so that we will be able to work this constituency into a model one. As I have said before and saying over and over and over, I have never moved away from my first thought, which is the vision of the four pillars on which the constituency sits — early childhood education, learn and earn programme, constituency cooperative society, and social infrastructural development.”

Clarke admitted to being “very tired” after a long campaign that started last year, but added: “The feeling is a feeling of real joy; tired but very joyful.”

His campaign, he said, “was well organised, we had a structured plan going in the election, and it was just a matter of time for the date to be announced and to get to the day”.