It was just too good to be true, our believing that politicians who have an adversarial relationship could have found consensus on the recommendations of the Constitutional Reform Committee (CRC).

So last week, when the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) said its members on the committee would not sign the final report which was submitted to the Cabinet, as it was not in keeping with positions advanced by the Opposition, the decision was true to form.

Ever since Jamaica gained political independence there has been very little that the PNP and Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) have agreed on, even when it was obvious that the country would benefit from a united
position.

We have pointed to this demented type of mindset before, particularly on the issue of crime.

The independent members of the CRC must now be feeling that they have wasted a year of their time, meeting as a committee to arrive at positions and participating in public discussions around the country on this important matter.

It is obvious that the PNP, boosted by its impressive performance in the February 26 local government elections, is using that strength to demand that Jamaica should tie leaving the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council for the Caribbean Court of Justice as a final appellate court with the intention to cut the British monarch as head of state.

However, the party and its president, Mr Mark Golding, must have known long before now that such a demand would have stalled the reform process, given that the Government had all along stated that the reform was being dealt with in three phases and that the issue of abolishing the constitutional monarchy and establishing the republic of Jamaica was the primary goal in phase one.

So what we now have is a stand-off and the possibility that we are back at the stage of pure talk, which has dogged this matter since it was first raised in the 1970s by then Prime Minister Michael Manley.

Mr Manley, as we pointed out a few weeks ago, died many years later and the needle had hardly moved on the matter. So when we saw the commitment of the members of the committee to get this process moving we were very encouraged.

The matter of our final court, we reiterate, can be settled by a referendum. We say again that both the Government and the Opposition should not shy away from putting that question to the Jamaican electorate.

With positions now hardened even more on both sides, we suggest that Prime Minister Andrew Holness and Mr Golding organise a one-on-one sit-down, leave their egos at the door, and come to an agreement on how to move forward, especially given the number of concerns that Mr Golding has raised about aspects of the committee’s report.

Talking through press releases and at individual news conferences will not resolve this stalemate because, as Mr Holness said at the post Cabinet press briefing last week, the country’s constitutional architecture cannot be disturbed without consensus.

Get to it, then, please, gentlemen.