In politics, your opponent’s weaknesses do not automatically constitute your strength. If you are the incumbent, you still have to deliver practical results that improve the dinner tables and grow the pockets of the majority. Especially if you are the main Opposition, you still have to convince a majority that the country would look far better, especially materially, after a term in office if your party were given the privilege of State power.

The Mark Golding-led People’s National Party (PNP) is evidently in the doldrums. I previously set out irrefutable evidence to support this determination.

“When an opponent is falling, don’t stand in the way” is a variation of the famous strategic advice “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” It is widely attributed to the former Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

The governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) naturally notices the very rickety state of the PNP and, unsurprisingly, is milking the PNP’s weaknesses. The PNP would do the same if the tables were turned. The JLP, though, would do well to always remember that it was primarily elected to deliver. The JLP must deliver.

Hard Times

Times are extremely tough in Jamaica. Ordinary Jamaicans are feeling the severe sting of rising inflation. It drives up the cost of food, utilities, and other basic necessities.

Those among us who sugar-coat this reality are living in la-la land. Their social and economic cocoons are blindfolds. It is true that inflation is rising primarily because of higher international energy and related costs. Jamaica does not produce a single drop of commercial crude oil.

Today marks 197 days since Israel and the United States struck Iran. I have heard several different timelines from international experts on when and how the war might end. What is not in doubt is that international air travel and related transport costs have already increased appreciably. That has very negative implications for our tourism sector, which is our largest foreign exchange earner.

Fertiliser prices are rising fast. This has very damaging implications for global agriculture and food prices. Gas prices locally have increased significantly in the last 197 days. The very harmful implications of those increases on food, electricity, and essentially everything bought and sold are obvious.

At the same time there is no suspension of reality among the average man or woman in the street. A majority still expects the elected Administration to deliver goods and services that improve lives and livelihoods. If a majority feels that the delivery it voted for is not happening and/or is unlikely to happen soon, a process of tuning out, turning off, and switching to something that sounds immediately attractive and connects with immediate material problems invariably kicks in.

Given the reality of our low-tech, low-growth, low-wage economy, folks are always focused on an answer to the questions: “What have you done for me lately?” and/or “What can you do for me soon?”

Democratic socialism

The Mark Golding-led Opposition knows that the Andrew Holness-led Administration is facing an uphill task with rising inflation. Consider this banner headline: ‘PNP bets on democratic socialism – Golding embraces Manley’s 1970s philosophy, vows to build on former PM’s legacy’ (The Gleaner, August 22, 2026). Golding has since said he was misrepresented and The Gleaner apologised. But the story has resurrected the ghost of democratic socialism.

The recent voice-note scandal and Golding’s bungling of a great opportunity to show real leadership, after six years of non-stop auditioning for the keys to Jamaica House, have totally destroyed any remaining relevance of his “accountability, transparency and integrity” sloganeering. Golding is now desperate and has to find a new gig in order to try to remain relevant.

Understand this: Irrespective of the jurisdiction, whenever inflation begins to bite severely, the left invariably resurrects democratic socialism or variants of this failed ideology. Socialists now call themselves progressive or the democratic left. Why? They are hiding their catastrophic failures.

I previously said here that “one of the greatest ideological casualties of the 20th century was socialism. There is no successful socialist economy anywhere on this Earth. Believe it: Jamaica came very close to becoming what Cuba and Venezuela are today. It would be suicidal to once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And for those who are quick to reach for the Scandinavian countries, don’t. Those countries are not socialist. As a matter of fact, during the period when some of the Scandinavian nations experimented with socialism, there was near social and economic ruin. Socialism, no matter how socialists try to wrap themselves in all sorts of convoluted disguises to hide their true antecedents, is the control of the production, distribution, and exchange of goods and services by the State. Numerous scholarly works from globally renowned authors have shown that socialism is antithetical to human nature”.

One does not need a degree in economics to realise that the creation of equity depends on fiscal soundness in the national economy. No amount of ideological bombast, professing of love for the poor, or embrace of new or old variations of socialism can cause the conditions of the majority of ordinary Jamaicans to improve materially in a sustained manner if there is an absence of fiscal soundness.

Golding is fighting for his political life. In my column of July 19, 2026, I said, among other things: “Mark Golding, the leader of the Opposition People’s National Party, is low on ammunition. Still, he continues to squander his diminishing political armaments. He is cornered. Like a drowning man, he is willing to clutch at even loose razor blades. Those who want his job see the blood in the water. Golding sounds and looks like a man trapped in a self-created circus. His sloganeering about accountability, transparency, and integrity is shot. His victimhood and persecution narrative has exploded. Golding’s own political hand-grenade caused the detonation. Is Golding preventing the Osmond Theodore Fairclough party from becoming credible enough to take back the keys to Jamaica House? This is a crucial question he will have to answer convincingly in the upcoming PNP leadership contest.

I do not foresee that Golding will cross the finish line first in the imminent leadership battle. Why? He has tried to sell himself as the tribune of the poor. He failed.”

By the early 1990s Manley, realising the folly of his ways, had a Damascus Road experience. The façade and big failures of democratic socialism were exposed as charlatanism, and the Jamaican people woke from their deep slumber on October 30, 1980.

Long ago David Frum, former speech writer for American President George W Bush, said, “If you take your rent money and go to the casino and bet on roulette and you win, it’s still not a good idea to take your rent money to the casino.”

Any attempt to repeat the failed experiment of democratic socialism from the 1970s would be national suicide.

In my column of January 12, 2025, entitled ‘Future can’t be as the past’, I pointed out that shortages, outages, and stoppages were the rule and not the exception. Jamaica could not pay her bills, and we were the laughing stock of the region. Then, Jamaica owed money to almost every Tom, Dick and Harry, including countries with severely repressive regimes. Iraq was one. Frequent devaluation of the local currency, biting austerity, suffocating inflation, rampant crime, capital flight, and the mass migration of many of our best and brightest — some 20,000 after Manley’s infamous “five flights a day” ultimatum — were the order of the day. While Manley and the PNP were at Jamaica House in the 1970s, Jamaica was literally brought to her knees.”

Jamaica became the “Poor Man of the Caribbean” because of the failed experiment of democratic socialism. Crippling debt and economic stagnation always follow socialist administrations like the grim reaper. Recall that when Patterson took the keys to Jamaica House in 1992, our debt was just about $60 billion; in a mere 14 years, Jamaica’s debt skyrocketed to just under $830 billion. It has taken Jamaica nearly 20 years to repay the lion’s share of the debt which the then Government piled onto the backs of Jamaicans during the 1990s. Between 2006 and 2007 the PNP were not in power long enough to go on their usual binge of suicidal borrowing. Dr Omar Davies, then finance and public service minister, euphemistically called it “deferred financing”. And from 2012 to 2016, Jamaica had already reached the limit of her ability to borrow.

Pluses and Minuses

I said previously, and I do not retreat one inch, that many of the social shifts which Manley presided over were absolutely necessary. I have also said that one cannot achieve sustained seismic social shifts without a sound economic anchor. Manley obliterated the sound economic base of the 1960s.

I still vividly remember when Manley joined us for a rap session at Taylor Hall at The University of the West Indies, Mona. It brings to mind Tony Benn’s belief that a leader’s highest calling is to be a teacher. Manley was a captivating teacher, even though much of his core message rested on flawed economic assumptions. Yet his genuine love for the people of Jamaica and his striking humility were unmistakable. Manley’s kind of genuine humility and love are scarce today.

Foundational pieces of legislation that have helped to make Jamaica a better place for the majority were enacted while Manley was at the wicket. These include the Labour Relations and Industrial Disputes Act (1975); the National Minimum Wage Law; Maternity Leave with Pay Act; Employment (Equal Pay for Men and Women) Act; National Housing Trust (NHT) Act (1979); and the Status of Children Act (1976). These reforms were a facsimile of the overhauls set out in the Beveridge Report (produced in the UK) published in 1942. There was no need to reinvent the wheel.

Doubtless some are going to scream that the actions of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and “the global north” caused Manley to be kicked from power in October 1980. The hundreds of millions wasted on phony projects was not the doing of the CIA. The ruinous misalignment of Jamaica’s foreign policy interests with states, including rogue ones, was not the doing of the CIA, et al. The atrocities, including the corrupt 1976 State of Emergency, were not done by the CIA. I could go on. Manley was no god. He was flawed just like you and me.

Garfield Higgins is an educator and journalist. Send comments to the Observer or higgins160@yahoo.com

Garfield Higgins