Editorial | The PNP, Fairclough and policy

Mark Golding, on this front, has accomplished something over which his recent predecessors postured without really getting much done. In launching a scholarship and trust fund in honour of OT Fairclough, Mr Golding may have rescued, if not for formal history then popular remembrance, the name of one of the People’s National Party’s (PNP) founders and early architects.

The 11 young people, at least, who last week received bursaries from that fund, will, or should be aware of OT Fairclough’s role in the formation of the PNP, and of his place in Jamaica’s history.

“He realised that coming out of our colonial experience of Jamaica and the brutal history of our country, it would be necessary to have a political movement that could change the dynamics of how the entire society was structured,” Mr Golding, the PNP leader, said of Fairclough at the ceremony at which the bursaries were awarded.

He added: “From one of control by an elite and very disparate opportunities and wealth to a more equal, egalitarian society. One which allowed persons of all vested groups, especially persons of African descent who were brought here from Africa, and their descendants, to be full citizens, owners of this country, playing their rightful role as leaders.”

MAN OF THOUGHT AND IDEAS

This general characterisation of OT Fairclough will unlikely be questioned. But there is a larger context and relevance to today’s PNP, against which this newspaper invokes his name. OT Fairclough was a man of thought and ideas.

Indeed, in the 1930s, Fairclough and people like WA Domingo, HP Jacobs and the Hill brothers (Frank and Ken) were leading voices in Jamaica’s emerging national movement, preaching for the island’s self-determination from colonial Britain. The ideas of a new, radical Jamaican nationalism found expression largely in Public Opinion, the weekly newspaper founded in 1937 by Jacobs, Frank Hill and Fairclough.

Fairclough, and others, initially approached, and failed to persuade, the PNP’s eventual founding president, Norman Manley, to lead a nationalist party in 1936. Manley decided to join the fray two years later, at the advent of the labour uprising in May of 1938. He and Fairclough played critical roles in planning the PNP’s launch in September of that year.

This brings us to the context of Fairclough, the PNP’s history, and the party as it stands today. Or, to pose the matter another way, no one is clear what the PNP stands for – neither this newspaper, nor the Jamaican electorate. It used to be that the PNP, from its inception, was a party of big ideas and large principles. Whether or not you agreed with its vision for Jamaica, it had a philosophy and certitude about the policies that flowed, or were likely to flow, therefrom. These were articulated with clarity and commitment.

TRADITION NO GUARANTEE

Now, there is a sense of drift in the PNP, which we noted last month in pointing to the aimlessness of its shadow Cabinet. The party rarely offers cogent critiques of, or compelling alternatives to, the Government’s policies. This is a perception of the PNP that lent an insubstantial quality to Mr Golding’s criticisms of Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ impalpable reshuffling of his Cabinet.

In its current state, there are many who believe that the PNP’s real hope for a return to government would be an implosion of the Holness administration, rather than the basis of its own policy prescriptions.

To be fair, Mr Golding has been the PNP’s president for only 15 months. The party’s drift long preceded his leadership. He also inherited its deep divisions, the healing of which has been slow. But he was aware of these major problems before he won the job.

His difficulties notwithstanding, Mr Golding is no doubt aware that voters will not put their personal aspirations on hold, or decide to give his party the benefit of the doubt, on the basis that, at some point, it will offer better alternatives than the incumbent’s policies and programmes.

Mr Golding is perhaps awaiting the report of the Anthony Bogues Commission on policy and vision they appointed last June before putting the PNP’s alternatives to the people, and, by extension, his shadow Cabinet to work.

That, in politics, is not the viable option. The absence of the Bogues report should not stop the party from doing things now – starting with a shadow Cabinet that demonstrates coherence and worthwhile ideas, not off-the-top-of-the-head bleatings about Government policies. That is not the tradition of Fairclough, Jacobs, the Hills, Hart, Arnett, Seivright, and the others who made the PNP possible.

We also know that Mr Golding is keenly aware that tradition is no guarantee of future existence.