Dear Editor,

In January and February 2016 the findings of all the polls conducted by two renowned market research institutes and The University of the West Indies sociologists unanimously predicted victory for the PNP at the February 25, 2016 General Election. They were wrong.

The PNP recently released the findings of an internal poll which predicts that its prospective candidate in the Portland Eastern by-election, Damion Crawford, will prevail. Again, we are being misled.

The people of Portland Eastern want to see change for the better. The vast majority of the electorate no longer believes that any change for the better will come from the People’s National Party (PNP), and certainly not from Crawford.

He prides himself as being a university lecturer with outstanding academic credentials, yet seriously posits: “…Because in the mind you have to understand that in the back of their mind every lawyer wants dem pickney to be a lawyer, that means somewhere in their mind they want somebody pickney to be a criminal, or else they will be a broke lawyer, and so we have to fight the system.”

Even if Crawford were right in assuming that all lawyers depend on criminals for their livelihood, his argument wouldn’t make much sense. Criminals usually don’t commit crimes to please lawyers; they hope not to get caught by the police and get away with it, either by escaping unidentified or by intimidating victims and witnesses.

Several members of the PNP are lawyers. If Crawford seriously means what he says he ought to commence sanitisation of the alleged parasites within his own political party. If he doesn’t mean what he says, what are the constituents of Portland Eastern supposed to believe?

Frederick Bucking

frederick.bucking@gmail.com