LEADING constitutional attorney, Dr Lloyd Barnett has said that there are two immediate imperatives to settling the debate on a new constitution: Jamaica’s links with the British monarchy and making the constitution a Jamaican document.

“Do you agree with me that we should become a republic and not continue with the monarchy; and, do you agree with me that the constitution should be a Jamaican document?” Dr Barnett enquired from an eager group of students of the Norman Manley Law School and members of the Jamaican Bar Association, which were both celebrating their 50th anniversary on the Mona campus of The University of the West Indies (UWI) on Thursday.

“These are what I call the two immediate imperatives because anything else…you can get a consensus on, in addition to that which both of us have already spoken about. It is the entrenchment of the Electoral Commission that should be included, right away,” he argued.

He said that if there should be consensus on any other body, including the Integrity Commission, the public defender should also be included as a consensus body, if there is agreement.

“We have to remember that the more changes you have, the greater the possibility of division and a lack of consensus. We have seen it,” Barnett warned.

He noted that even the popular prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr Ralph Gonsalves, had tried to introduce a comprehensive constitutional reform, which failed.

“We have had four other failures in the Caribbean because we have tried to do too much at one time — and once a person has a negative response to one particular item, then the person tends to go negative.

“It is also important too because the way in which I see it, the machinery being implemented if we are going to have a new constitutional instrument, is to put in new instruments and have one vote where the people become legislators and, in the referendum, say that we approve of this new document and that document includes all that we have consensus on. If we don’t have consensus on it then that document is rejected,” he explained.

Former Opposition Leader Dr Peter Phillips said it is obvious Jamaicans make political decisions based on party preference.

“We tend to go en bloc in terms of the party. If you fail to do so, you are chastised by your own party,” he added, suggesting that if the electorate should free themselves from the stranglehold of the party and vote on the basis of their own conscience, it would make the transition much easier.

He said that parliamentarians should always be allowed to vote their conscience, and not have to run to the bathroom when the vote is being taken.

“We should have better consensus in terms of moving forward with our constitutional reform,” he said.

He noted that late Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Eric Williams’ statement of “one from 10 leaves nought” was exemplified in Jamaica in the 1990s when former prime minister and leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Bruce Golding was willing to withdraw from the party in dissent and form the National Democratic Movement (NDM) — a move with which the constitutional reform committee of the period and then leader of the party, Edward Seaga, were unwilling to proceed.

“Seaga was unwilling to proceed with the reform effort on his side, and we lost what was basically a half a generation’s work. But there was one good result, which was the Charter of Rights which came out of the willingness to discuss it then,” he added.

“So we are back where we started, which causes me not to disagree with the proposition made by Lloyd [Barnett] but first to try and get as much as we can get of a consensus, in round one, because I find that we can take a mighty long time to go from round one to round two in our political modernisation experience,” Phillips added.