Editorial | Lothan Cousins’ idiocy

If Mark Golding, its president, has any authority over the People’s National Party (PNP) and hopes to rebuild it as a potent political force, he must tell the country where he stands on the Lothan Cousins’ harangue about race and political affiliation. Mr Cousins, a first-term member of parliament (MP), claimed that poor, black Jamaicans cannot naturally be supporters of the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Supposedly, black people who support that party are confused sell-outs.

And should Mr Golding reject those notions, and has cause for Mr Cousins to be disciplined, he will collide with an earlier failure to do the right thing. In January, he contorted and waffled over the party’s general secretary Dayton Campbell’s comment of Robert Montague being “the leader of the black section of the Labour Party”.

Dr Campbell is an ally of Mr Golding, who the PNP leader believes has his back in the fractious internal politics of the PNP. So he rode out a short-lived furore over Dr Campbell’s gratuitous politics of colour and sacrificed principle. Now, there is Mr Cousins. And therein lies the consequences of failing to do the right thing, and when political behaviour is not grounded in a clear philosophy.

Last Sunday, Mr Cousins, who represents Clarendon South Western in Jamaica’s House of Representatives, spoke at the constituency party conference of Julian Robinson, the shadow finance minister and MP for St Andrew South Eastern. Mr Cousins ranted, if in exaggerated terms, about the inflation being felt by Jamaicans.

UNWARRANTED FLAYING

That is fair political game. What wasn’t, was the MP’s unwarranted flaying of a specific private-sector company, the publicly listed Jamaica Broilers Group, and his presumption of imbecility against the many thousands of black Jamaicans who vote for the JLP.

“A friend of mine once said the only person who is a Labourite, who is a black Labourite, must be a confused PNP,” Mr Cousins told the audience. “And I support that! Because I can’t see how poor black people can support a party like the Jamaica Labour Party. That is not the party for us.”

To be fair to Mr Cousins, who is also a lawyer, we discerned in his screed a blurry grasp at ideology – and perhaps an attempt to relitigate Jamaica’s politics of the 1970s. Which is perhaps an indictment of the PNP for failing, over many years, to settle on where to locate itself on the ideological spectrum, although since the 1990s the party has moved decidedly to the right and does not often speak of its roots in democratic socialism. Indeed, the question of where it ought to stand, and how that should be interpreted in the 21st century, was outsourced to the Jamaican political scholar and Brown University professor, Anthony Bogues, whose report is not yet a public document.

But Mr Cousins’ remarks lacked ideological and intellectual coherence. It was essentially victim-centric, flailing at windmills. The private sector, he said, would never support the PNP because it was the party of the people. JLP was “the party of the minority, which is the private-sector group”.

A claim, inherent in Mr Cousins’ argument, that the private sector as a class may prefer a particular political party, or that the policies of a party may favour specific interests, is not of itself an unworthy political argument. What was dangerous, though, was Mr Cousins’ invidious pivot from that generality to the assertion, without offering evidence, that Jamaica Broilers’ recent J$12 a kilo reduction in the price of chicken was “another three card trick” to “prop up the Government”.

MORE THAN BALD STATEMENT

The accusation that a publicly listed company acted for the sake of partisan politics rather than in the interest of shareholders, or what is morally right, demands more than a bald statement. If Mr Cousins has credible information, including hard data analysis, he must produce it.

But the more worrying aspect of Mr Cousins’ clumsy foray into ideological populism was his dive into the politics of colour, and his seeming absence of self-awareness. Mr Cousins, after all, is a member of a party that is led by a white, wealthy Jamaican nationalist, whose life transcends race. Like Dr Campbell’s January remarks about Mr Montague and the black wing of the JLP, Mr Cousins’ runs the risk of raising unfair and unwarranted questions about Mr Golding’s legitimacy.

Of course, as we observed in January, at the time of Dr Campbell’s faux pas,the relationship between colour and class and people’s economic circumstances remains an unresolved feature of Jamaican society. It is deserving of thoughtful and nuanced political discussion.

However, a crass attempt at creating political schisms on the basis of colour is a recipe for a return to the worst bits of the distressed political culture from which Jamaica has worked hard to extricate itself, but the remnants of which are still to be defeated, and to which no one wants to return. That is why Mr Cousins’ invective should not avoid censure. And even at this stage, Dr Campbell’s.