Dear Editor,

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally drowned under the wave of resignations from both his Government and party that exceeded some 50 people on Thursday, July 7, 2022.

As I listened to Johnson’s resignation speech, two phrases stood out — “herd instinct at Westminster” and the “Darwinian world of Westminster”.

A herd instinct is said to be a behaviour in which people join groups and follow the actions of others. Sadly, in Jamaica, we see this in our thirst for human blood, often manifested in mob killings, of which the death of Chieftin Campbell, who was beaten by a mob in Mandeville, is a recent negative manifestation of this instinct.

However, Johnson suggested he believed he had been the victim of Westminster’s herd mentality as he said: “As we have seen at Westminster, the herd instinct is powerful and when the herd moves, it moves, and my friends in politics, no one is remotely indispensable.”

Within the context of British politics, politicians on the same side of a party can call for the resignation of the party leader or prime minister, an action that is alien in Jamaica’s political life. As a matter of fact, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) spent almost 20 years in the political wilderness because one of its former prime ministers refused to resign and did all that was humanly possible to circumvent the Darwinian world of potential leaders.

The other phrase, Darwinian world of Westminster, used by Johnson, is said to be that which had “forced him to call it quits”. Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual’s ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. Its application to Westminster is therefore of interest.

For me, Johnson’s use and application highlights an environment charcterised by the compete, survive, and reproduce aspects of Darwinism. Here, again, Jamaican politics and culture views such manifestation in democracy as disruptive and “dissing”. This opposition to democratic principles was displayed in the voices of certain prominent people who opposed the nomination of our Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Kamina Johnson Smith as a candidate for the Commonwealth secretary general post, and was further influenced by Jamaicans’ belief in an heir apparent function of leadership in politics.

It was Professor Louis Moyston who best captured our disdain for democratic principles when commenting on the 2013 leadership challenge within the JLP in a Jamaica Observer article ‘Democracy and the JLP — a long way from home’: “The 2013 challenge to party leader Andrew Holness was not about ‘bad mind’, grudge, and grudgeful, it was about establishing the first principle of a political party in what is called a democracy [my emphasis]. And that was about having, for the first time in 70 years, the popular election by delegates, the leader of the JLP. From its inception the JLP has been controlled by the ‘One Don’ style of leadership. The JLP and its members should be grateful for that event. It welcomed the JLP into a journey of becoming a modern political party.”

The People’s National Party that once boasted the ideal democratic principles also suffers from memory loss, we only need to reflect on the newspaper headline: ‘PNP divided, derailed and distressed …but not dead’ (Jamaica Observer, June 6, 2021).

Let us not forget these lessons and reinforce the ideals of democracy as a better choice than mob rule or political dictatorship.

Dudley C McLean II

Mandeville, Manchester

dm15094@gmail.com