EDITORIAL - PNP leader offering more fluff than fixes

According to the prepared text of her address to last Sunday's closed meeting of the People's National Party's (PNP) National Executive Committee (NEC), the party's president, Portia Simpson Miller, declared her intention to speak "frankly and bluntly".

We assume that Mrs Simpson Miller stuck close to her text and that the PNP machinery felt the written document captured the essential points of her remarks. Indeed, the party's secretariat felt comfortable enough to release it to the press, after the fact.

The PNP should be happy that no one has up to now paid substantial attention to that NEC meeting and, especially, to Mrs Simpson Miller's speech.

For the bald truth is that it suggests a party that has learnt little from its three years in opposition, expecting to be swept back into office merely on the failures, maladministration and misbehaviour of the current administration and its leader, Mr Bruce Golding.

Mrs Simpson Miller's "frank and blunt" speech was largely a windy declaration about Jamaica's deepening poverty, broken promises, and the lies and half-truths of Mr Golding's government. There was a call, too, now that the country is "entering the home stretch" towards a general election, for her party to be tactically prepared.

What, unfortunately, was lacking from the PNP president's prepared remarks was an overarching strategy and/or tactics for guiding Jamaica out of its deep economic and social crisis. Or worse, there was no sense from the party leader that at this stage in the election cycle, there is any appreciation that details and substance are important for the fulfilment of her declared priorities of:

• economic growth;
• job creation;
• poverty reduction;
• expansion of agriculture and agro-processing;
• improving national security and justice;
• providing quality education;
• improving health care.

The whole affair reminds us of the PNP's ephemeral policy document, which has grandly been declared to be its Progressive Agenda.

In so far as anything of substance from that agenda has been shared with the Jamaican public, it is like Mrs Simpson Miller's offering on Sunday, a frothy statement of intent.

Lest we be mistaken or misunderstood, it is not that we do not expect Mrs Simpson Miller's sloganeering - on which her prepared text was particularly strong - to attempt to gee up her party workers.

It is our position, however, that a political party hoping to form the next government should seek to ride more than the disenchantment of voters with the other lot. Voters deserve more than woolly ideas and opaque policies.

This is particularly relevant to the PNP, having spent more than 18 years in government, for which it can claim no great credit for growing the economy or advancing security or justice.

In that regard, the PNP must not only point to the failures of the current administration. It must say how it will do things differently, including how it will be more effective than during its previous turn.

This demands seriously engaging the Jamaican people about specifics.

There was apparently, however, at least one bit of realism injected into that NEC meeting: the reported frank assessment by the former PNP president, Mr P.J. Patterson, about how poorly the shadow Cabinet has performed.

He could have said the same about policy formulation in the party.

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