KINGSTON, Jamaica— The People’s National Party (PNP) is not allowing the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) standard- bearer for Westmoreland Central, George Wright, to forget the infamous alleged stool-beating incident which saw him dropped from the JLP’s parliamentary caucus in 2021.

Wright resigned from the JLP in June 2021, nine months after he was elected Member of Parliament (MP) in the September 2020 general election. This, after a viral video surfaced in late April 2021 showing a man, believed to be Wright, raining blows on a woman with both his fists and a stool.

Although neither Wright nor the woman, Tannisha Singh, with whom he had an intimate relationship at the time, publicly confirmed that they were the individuals in the video, both filed separate reports with the police. However, neither Wright nor Singh, who he later married after a reported year of counseling, cooperated with the police, forcing them to drop their investigation.

By February this year Wright was back in the fold of the JLP and the PNP is now beating the issue on the campaign trail as the date for the next general election draws closer.

At a PNP parish meeting on Saturday night where the party’s three candidates for Westmoreland were presented to a large crowd at Independence Park in Savanna-la-Mar, the party’s standard-bearer for the constituency, Dwayne Vaz, brought a stool on stage. He declared loudly that “PNP don’t beat women with stools or anything else.”

Vaz was less than five minutes into a 20-minute speech when he said, “Mi a beg unno one second fi show unno summen”. He then went to the side of the stage and returned with a stool, held it aloft and said, “I don’t know if unno recognise dah summen yah,” before sitting on it.

Continuing, Vaz said, ‘’Comrades, as far as I learn inna life I know stool is fi siddung pon. I never know say stool a fi beaten stick fi beat ooman. But we are real comrades and we don’t believe in beating woman with nuh stool or nutten at all because we love wi woman dem, wi nah fight di woman dem”.

When he spoke, PNP President and Opposition leader Mark Golding declared Wright’s candidacy to be an insult to all the women of Westmoreland and Jamaica.

Wright inflicted a shock defeat on Vaz in the September 3, 2020 general election which saw the JLP winning in a landslide and securing 49 seats to the PNP’s 14. In Westmoreland Central which is regarded as perhaps the safest PNP seat in western Jamaica, Wright polled 8,477 votes to Vaz’s 7,288.

Vaz first won the seat in a 2014 by-election following the death of the PNP’s Roger Clarke. He retained it in the 2016 general election.

Despite the comfortable margin of victory for Wright last time out, Vaz and the PNP are confident that all three Westmoreland seats will return to the PNP win column in the upcoming election. The party’s general secretary Dayton Campbell is contesting Westmoreland Eastern while its deputy leader Ian Hayles is looking to bring home Westmoreland Western.