EDITORIAL - The JLP's wings should fight it out

The re-emergence of the papered-over fault lines in the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) may not be so bad after all.

That, though, depends on whether the party's leader, Prime Minister Bruce Golding, can rediscover the persona who led the JLP to victory and the gumption to take on the old guard, and some of the young nasties, who have tolerated his leadership as one merely of convenience.

In part, this latest challenge to Mr Golding's authority is, on the surface, the result of his continued mishandling of the Coke-Manatt affair, which has laid bare his less-than-apt political skills.

So, this week, he declared that Harold Brady, the JLP fixer who hired the lobbyists Manatt, Phelps & Phillips to frustrate America's attempt to extradite the alleged drug don, Christopher Coke - was no longer a member of the party.

Apparently, Mr Golding was relying on a technicality - that Mr Brady has not paid his party dues for the past three years. Mr Brady insists that he remains in the JLP and seemingly has the support of many ranking party officials, who feel that Mr Golding misinterpreted the JLP's constitution.

The specifics of the crisis, however, represent only the surface of the problems facing Mr Golding and his party.

More fundamentally, it reveals how much Mr Golding, the idealist and reformer, has been recaptured by the old JLP that he left, returned to and sought to change; it speaks also to how much those who Mr Golding abandoned, then re-embraced, continue to distrust his intentions and likely effect on their ambitions.

The Bruce Golding who used to inveigh against the comity between crime and politics and the creation of political garrison, and insisted on a new quality of governance, would not, in whatever capacity, have sanctioned the engagement of Manatt for the purpose the JLP did. Nor would he have sought to retreat from the assumption of responsibility and apology for the affair which, when stripped to the core, is what appears to have happened, with the fingering of Brady as the culprit.

Mr Golding's attempt to appease the JLP's calcified old guard and their acolytes merely provides openings for the launching of raids on a reform agenda, which has been largely dormant, but which the prime minister claims to have rediscovered.

Perhaps Mr Golding, if he is serious, should seek neither to suture the wounds nor paper over the cracks. In that case, he would throw down the gauntlet, insist on an open fight, allowing the JLP to settle its direction.

Hopefully, that would mean the defeat of the old guard and the freeing of Golding the reformer.

Mr Golding may fear that such a fight could lead to the collapse of his government, which is possible, but not the most likely of outcomes. If the fight ends with the reformist at the head of the party, with or without Mr Golding, they could get on with the job of modernising the JLP.

The lurching from crisis to crisis by the ruling party is untenable. If Mr Golding is to be Jamaica's prime minister, he must recapture himself and proceed, as we have suggested, as though he has just come to office, with much to do and with little time in which to do it.

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