FORMER vice-president of the People’s National Party (PNP), Dr Angela Brown Burke, believes that recent poll findings will make the party that she represents work harder to regain State power.

Brown Burke, who is seeking to return as Member of Parliament for St Andrew South West, following her landslide victory in the October 2017 by-election when she replaced long-time representative Portia Simpson Miller in the seat, said she would not denounce the poll findings which have seen the PNP trail the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) by double-digit numbers in recent weeks.

A poll done by Bill Johnson for the Jamaica Observer put the JLP ahead of the PNP by 19 points; while that done by Dr Don Anderson for the RJR/Gleaner Group saw the JLP cantering with a lead by 16 points last week.

“I have never quarrelled with a poll. I’m not turned off. I’m hoping that the poll results which see us trailing will be that other push that we need for everybody to come out on the ground and just make sure that we need to do what we have to do,” the former Kingston mayor told the Sunday Observer at the end of Nomination Day activities in the constituency that she seeks to represent again, last Tuesday.

“If the poll says I am winning, I go and redouble my effort; if it says I am losing, I go and do it twice over. That’s what we have to do as PNP — connect on the ground, because polls have been wrong before,” she said, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic could affect poll findings, and describing it as a “big concern”.

“We want to win the election because we understand what is coming to the people if we don’t, but at the same time we want to make it clear that we are concerned about the safety and health of our people and we want to encourage individuals to do all they can to abide by the protocols that have been established around COVID-19,” Brown Burke went on.

She described the situation now with COVID-19, which has seen mounting cases in a second wave of infection, as “total mismanagement” of the process, maintaining that the spike that the country has witnessed over the last two weeks “must be laid squarely at the feet of the Jamaica Labour Party”, following a start in which she admitted that the JLP Administration could have been given a fair grade.

So was it a good time for Prime Minister Andrew Holness to announce a general election?

“In thinking about it and doing the analysis, we thought that they would have called it but figured they wouldn’t do so now, based on what was happening with COVID-19 and the uncertainty. The fact that they have [called election] though speaks to their own irresponsibility and desperation. The only thing that it could be —that you want to catch it now before it gets worse. That for me is just not good,” Brown Burke suggested.

A re-energised PNP base is what Brown Burke sees as a positive happening now to the party that was founded in 1938 with a primary focus on looking out for the interest of the downtrodden, the proletariat and middle class.

Like others in or close to the hierarchy of the political organisation, Brown Burke agrees that many of the supporters, who may not have come out for the party in the 2016 General Election that it lost by a seat to the JLP, were now returning to play their role in stopping Holness from leading the incumbent group to consecutive victories, which would be a first for the JLP in contested elections against the PNP, since the party did so in 1962 and 1967.

The JLP won the general elections of 1980 and 1983, but the 83 poll was boycotted by the PNP, led then by Michael Manley, who complained bitterly about holding an election on what he described as an outdated and irrelevant voters’ list.

One of the views at the time, though, was that the JLP had gained a bounce from its involvement with the United States in the invasion of Windward Island Grenada, following the murder of its left-wing leader Maurice Bishop by rebels of his party, the New Jewel (Joint Endeavour for Welfare, Education, and Liberation) Movement, and Edward Seaga, who had led the JLP to a 51-9 vistory in the 1980 General Election here when the House of Representatives had 60 seats, grasped the opportunity to hold the poll which was due in 1985.

“I think that the people are clear. They are angry when they see how much money tief gone ina pocket, when they see how many things are lacking in the country and their communities – the issue of water in their communities, when they look at their own lives with security, they are not secure, not safe in their homes, communities and country. They are fed up,” Brown Burke argued.

As to how united the PNP is, following a bruising presidential election last year which saw party President Dr Peter Phillips shake off a challenge from Peter Bunting, whom Brown Burke backed, the outspoken former councillor for the Norman Gardens Division in the then Kingston & St Andrew Corporation, now the Kingston & St Andrew Municipal Corporation, brushed aside suggestions that the peace fence still contained holes in it.

“It is a false narrative being promoted by some about the lack of unity in the party. We are united and we are where we should be, which is on the ground with the people to get their votes,” she stated in response.

“I don’t know why anybody would question the unity of the People’s National Party at this time. We are like any family, families have their moments when they have their disagreements, they have their fusses, and then when that is all over we come together.

“We have a bigger picture, and the bigger picture is a rescue mission for Jamaica, which means that the People’s National Party, based on the covenant which we have signed, a commitment to the people to do things like ending apartheid in education, so that children everywhere can have an opportunity; deal with the issue of land and titling, so that people like us, descendants of enslaved people, can have the right and access to land, deal with job creation and wealth creation.

“We have made a solemn commitment; the people have seen that the Jamaica Labour Party is mismanaging the country with all of what they are saying, people are not better off, people are feeling the pinch. The poverty is real. It is not a figment of anybody’s imagination. It is there,” Brown Burke insisted.

As for a Cabinet appointment, should State power return the PNP’s way, Brown Burke was coy.

“We have depth in the PNP. We have 63 candidates that almost every one of them can occupy any position that the prime minister at the time would want them to do. The truth is, I am just happy to serve the people of South West St Andrew, they are the ones that put me there. I am in it to serve and as long as I am serving them and giving them the best of me, that’s all I want.”