Insults were thrown around on Thursday night during the first of two televised debates between the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) and the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) at the Creative Production and Training Centre at Arnold Road, Kingston.

While the six debaters went at each other for 90 minutes, answering questions about how their parties would address the myriad problems facing local government, from bad roads to a lack of water and corruption in the contracting process, it sometimes got personal.

On one such occasion, the PNP’s Natalie Neita-Garvey accused the JLP’s Venesha Phillips of deception.

Phillips, who left the PNP for the JLP and has since been publicly critical of her former party, is seeking to retain the Papine Division which she won on a PNP ticket in the last election in 2016.

Neita-Garvey, the PNP spokesperson on local government, went on the attack while answering a question about whether there should be some basic qualification for persons seeking elected office as councillors.

After stating that education was important, Neita-Garvey, who served for nine years as a councillor said: “Yes, on the ground learning is important. Yes, your passion for people is critical because no matter how much education you have, if you don’t love people like dem on that side you won’t go very far.

She continued: “Because when you talk about deception, it was my friend [Phillips] in the last debate [representing the PNP], who said that the most deceptive government was the Jamaica Labour Party government, who …is now part of the deception team. So I want to know if she has sold out to the deception because tonight I know that the People’s National Party remains that party that is going to field a cadre of strong, effective and hardworking councillors who will have the minimum qualification to get the job done”.