EDITORIAL - Shameless Sharon and the PNP gang

WE MUST confess that there is a wee part of us that harbours grudging admiration for Mrs Sharon Hay-Webster, the People's National Party (PNP) member who clings to the seat for South Central St Catherine in the House of Representatives.

For there is something fascinating about someone so seemingly conditioned and calloused, if not made callous, by politics as to be impervious to shame, thus capable of eschewing arguments of morality and hanging on to membership of the legislature with fuzzy legalism.

We were clear about Mrs Hay-Webster's lurches on principle all along. What we did not know, until the WikiLeaks cable disclosure, published by this newspaper on Sunday, was how far she had gone.

But the revelation was more than about Mrs Hay-Webster. It underlines, too, the amorality of the PNP, and why this supposedly venerable political party can be appropriately labelled one of the gangs of Gordon House, until it recovers from its dysfunctional behaviour and claws its way back to a moral and respectable place in Jamaican society.

Section 40 of the Jamaican Constitution prohibits membership in the legislature to persons who, by their "own act", are under "acknowledgement or allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power or state". The exception is if that foreign state is a Commonwealth country, which, of course, is ridiculous.

The PNP, via its proxies, used this stipulation to drive four members of the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) from the Parliament. They were returned in by-elections, having first renounced their US and, in one case, Venezuelan citizenship. A fifth, Everald Warmington, walked the plank before he was pushed.

Mrs Hay-Webster, one of whose parents is Jamaican, was born in the United States. She has a US passport, which she probably acquired as an adult, by her "own act". She, however, says she has never travelled on her American passport.

At first, while the dual-citizenship controversy swirled, Mrs Hay-Webster held tight, but then argued she was different from the others who held foreign citizenship.

Then at the beginning of August 2009, she told this newspaper she would renounce her US citizenship, having reported her decision to her constituents days earlier.

underhanded move

The WikiLeaks cable reveals that Mrs Hay-Webster did attend the US Embassy in Kingston on July 31, 2009 to inform of her intent to renounce. What Mrs Hay-Webster had not previously reported was that she returned to the embassy, according to the mission's report to the State Department, less than a week later to withdraw her renunciation request.

We, like the embassy, can only draw the conclusion that Mrs Hay-Webster's intent was to "leave the public with the impression of having renounced her US citizenship".

No one, unfortunately, followed up with the MP, although it would have had to come out in court since her eligibility for Parliament has now been challenged by the JLP.

The 'parliamentarian' has declined to comment on this act of brazen shamelessness, on the advice of her lawyers, she claims, as though morality is something to be legislated and pronounced upon from the Bench after arguments by attorneys.

We doubt that the PNP believes in the legal efficacy of Mrs Hay-Webster's case, or has thought of the party's moral position on the matter, given the intellectual atrophy that plagues that organisation.

But its behaviour is quite rational as a gang: defending the interest of the group at any cost and with any consequence.

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