EDITORIAL - No cause for the gangs of Gordon House to squeal

Not surprisingly, the gangs of Gordon House, their confederates and apologists have been smarting from this newspaper's reference to them for what they are - gangs.

Their effort, perversely, is to suggest that we have picked on the innocent and that this characterisation of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People's National Party (PNP) as gangs is to unfairly impugn two noble institutions and to undermine these declared critical pillars of Jamaica's democracy.

There is, in other words, an assumption of, or attempt to, assume victimhood, the tears of which crocodiles would recognise.

But, as we explained before, in the use of 'gangs' to describe these two, and ostensibly venerable, political parties, we applied the most benign definition of the word that we could: of closed groups that operate in pursuance of their own interests and the interests of those around them.

The Oxford Concise Dictionary offers other interesting definitions of gangs, including orga-nised groups of criminals.

There is, too, the notion of ganging up: that is, of persons joining together, typically in order to intimidate others.

But let's return to our primary definition as it relates to the gangs of Gordon House, the parties that have alternated in Government in Jamaica for more than half a century.

There are few persons in this country who would argue that either gang, despite sporadic declarations of fealty to openness, has been transparent in its operation, a fact that was recently underlined by the JLP's leader, Mr Bruce Golding, while testifying at the commission of enquiry into the Christopher Coke extradition scandal.

He was not, Mr Golding told his cross-examiner, about to disclose who financed the JLP's programmes.

The PNP has said it has no such qualms. Yet, in the absence of constraint, it has failed to name its financiers.

Neither the PNP nor the JLP would seriously resist the claim that in the pursuit of group interest, it, when in office, skews huge chunks of state resources to friends and supporters, contributing to the fact and perception of Jamaica as an extremely corrupt country.

garrison culture

There are two painfully profound consequences of the perpetration of this corruption of democracy in the effort to establish a firm grip, if not monopoly, on power - a predisposition to win at all costs, and the 'capturing' and 'expansion' of territory in order to win and to hold power.

The upshot: a culture of violence in Jamaica's politics, with its handmaidens, the politically affiliated criminal gangs and the so-called garrison communities, where muscle is used to maintain electoral strangleholds for political parties.

These criminal gangs, the praetorian guards for the parties, with their increasingly independent wealth from crime, may not, these days, be in the deep bowels of the parties. But given the relations of some with key leaders of the parties, they remain closer than the periphery.

The parties themselves have made no significant effort to break that nexus, which, as Martin Henry, our columnist, reminded a week ago, "is as old as the political parties themselves".

Defeating, as Mr Henry put it, "political criminality" and transforming Jamaica will require, among other things, civil society keeping pressure on the gangs of Gordon House.

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