A historic day for the JLP

Martin Henry

By three o'clock this afternoon, we will know who around 5,100 Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) delegates have chosen to try and beat Portia Simpson Miller and the People's National Party (PNP) in the next general election. Because, let's face it: That's what political parties are about - to win state power by ballot and to form government. The rest is commentary.

I found it more than a little strange - and silly - that media, up to the level of sober editorials, were demanding differentiating policy positions for the two candidates for the leadership of the one party. Stranger and sillier was the whining of the Andrew Holness camp that Audley Shaw had plagiarised policy. It is sensible to expect that the party would have a coherent policy position which the two candidates, as senior leaders, would have contributed to and endorsed prior to competing.

What would truly be strange is if there was any sharp policy divergence. One would have expected that party policy would belong equally to the two contenders and, indeed, to the whole leadership and membership. Any personal claim to policy and plan by one contender would, it seems, strengthen the view of secrecy and isolating fellow leaders.

The fact of the matter is that the selection of JLP party leader is a pick of the better bull, in the estimate of the pickers, for the political clash of party leadership bulls in general elections. Bruce Golding was elevated without contest to party leadership for the 2007 general election on precisely these terms. Things like loyalty and expectation of benefits as returned favour, not to mention real analysis of leadership capability in government as prime minister, may have some influence but are way behind like Usain Bolt's competitors.

SWAYING VOTES

If the JLP delegates believe in the majority that the next election battle is set to be a quieter, new politics of debating ideas across a "philosophical divide"; if they reject "the commodification of politics as a transactional exchange of money and favours for support"; if they see the election as another time of peddling bitter medicine which is good for the country, a certain outcome is more than likely today. But if they believe that Portia is Portia and the PNP is the PNP, and the next battle at the polls will be a battle of personality and presence and that elections must be won before a party can govern, even by the 'short-cut approach', since they will all be dead on the long road of philosophy before retaking state power, they are likely to vote another way.

All kinds of endorsing and disendorsing have gone into the campaign. The leadership of three of four area councils have anointed Shaw. General Secretary Dr Horace Chang erred very badly in believing that the office confers on him any right to publicly present any analysis of candidate standing among delegates in the area councils. That's not the gen sec's job as umpire. He shouldn't even be in media at all, except to neutrally discuss arrangements for the internal election.

But what could be a far more revealing index of today's outcome is the endorsement of Shaw by the combined women's groups of the party following the perceived dissing of a woman councillor by a Holness endorser, Karl Samuda, without the demanded apology forthcoming.

If the women of the party, excepting Babsy Grange, of course, have at all lined up behind the tough-talking leadership of the women's groups, it is going to be Mr Holness who will be a spokesman in Mr Shaw's Shadow Cabinet! Holness has graciously indicated, via an address to Rotarians last week, that should he retain, or rather when he retains, the leadership of the party, Audley Shaw will be back as his shadow finance minister if Shaw wants the job.

This is not a gladiatorial contest, a fight to the death with the vanquished butchered for the pleasure of the crowd. As we saw with the PNP in its own bruising leadership battles, the team will come back together to fight the other party for electoral victory and to govern together. Successful politics requires a pragmatic accommodation of others who might have been enemies but are declared friends in the mutual quest for power.

But wait a minute! If Audley Shaw wins the leadership of the party in opposition, there is nothing in the rule book which makes him leader of the opposition. The Constitution, at Section 80 (2), says the governor general shall appoint as leader of the opposition, in his discretion, the member of the House of Representatives who is best able to command the support of the majority of members of parliament (MPs) who do not support the Government. Or appoint the person with the largest minority bloc of support, if it is not a single bloc. It is the non-government MPs who will, by their support, decide who is leader of the opposition, not the delegates of the JLP voting today.

NOTHING NEW

Andrew Holness, anointed to win after the unceremonious exit of Bruce Golding, who himself had been anointed to win, badly lost the last general election which he called for a date only two months into his stint as prime minister. The five-person commission appointed by the party to enquire into the reasons for the 2011 election loss could have saved itself a great deal of leg work and write its report from the office. What was there in the report to keep hidden is hard to see now that it has been leaked. The report simply organises and presents street analysis already done in every bar and on every veranda.

The Manatt-Coke issue and the overwhelming public vilification of party leader and Prime Minister Bruce Golding were the single biggest factor which cost the party the election in December 2011 and would have cost it at any subsequent time in the less than one year remaining in government after Holness' elevation to leadership. We can argue about margin of defeat if the other factors gathered by the commission from unnecessary field work had factored in differently.

But the JLP, the other half and not by any means a smaller half of the country's two-party political system, will rise again.

The party has formed the government for 34 of the 69 years from Universal Adult Suffrage in 1944 until now, and will do so again. How best to achieve a return to power at earliest is what delegates are wrestling with in voting booths at the National Arena today.

And Shaw has taken the gamble of his life. Ambitions frustrated in the past, and now 62, if he takes the party leadership today but doesn't take the next general election, due by December 29, 2016 when he is 65, he is not likely to go on and do so five years later when he is 70 and will never become prime minister of Jamaica. It's not the party, stupid! The party is the jeep to Jamaica House!

The country has called upon the JLP for leadership at several critical junctures in its political history. At the critical point of transition from Crown Colony to a degree of self-government under Universal Adult Suffrage when every person 21 and over was given the right to vote, the country overwhelmingly chose the JLP and its flamboyant leader, Alexander Bustamante, to form the Government.

The JLP took 41.4 per cent of the vote and 22 of 32 seats. The PNP only mustered five seats with 23.5 per cent of the votes cast. Where did the other votes and seats go? Independents collected 30 per cent of the votes and the other five seats. And other political parties managed only 5.1 per cent of the votes with no seats. O, for the good old days of the independents!

The country sided with Busta and the JLP in the 1961 referendum to leave the West Indies Federation. And when asked to choose party and leader for Independence in the general election of April 1962, Bustamante and the JLP were chosen 26 seats to 19 for the PNP in the then 45-member House of Representatives.

HAMMERED AT POLLS

In the ideologically charged election of 1980, with sharp polarisation between the two political parties and both the highest levels of political violence and of voter turnout (86.91 per cent) to date, the JLP was elected to change course with 51 seats in the then 60-seat House from 58.34 per cent of the votes, up to then the widest margin before the counter-murderation of the party by the PNP in the 1993 election.

As he packed his bags to go, the wounded Golding single-handedly anointed Andrew Holness in a damaging exit speech which advocated youth for successor leadership for the seriously embattled governing party. Potential contenders, including Shaw, trying to avoid party division and desperately hoping for the party to retain power after Golding, publicly grinned and bore it and rallied around the glitzy Holness. The shine has largely faded, and Shaw has challenged.

There is a real contest today between two strong contenders. There will be no runaway victory or loss in this closely fought contest. It has been no more dirty and will be no more damaging than the PNP leadership contests.

Politics, by its very nature, is a battle of bulls within and between parties. From familiar places we have seen the nasty fight in the US Democratic Party between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton; the ousting of Gordon Brown from leading the British Labour Party; and, before that, the coup d'état against Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative Party. Over in Australia, there was the ousting of Kevin Rudd by Julia Gillard from the leadership of the Labour Party while the party was in power and the counter-ousting of Gillard by Rudd a mere three years later. And the Owen Arthur-Mia Mottley musical chairs exchange of leadership of the Barbados Labour Party has been playing in our corner of the world.

Today, delegates will have a hard choice. There will be no runaway victory or loss in this closely fought contest as in the lamb to the slaughter non-contests between Edward Seaga and Wilton Hill in 1974 and between Seaga and Mike Henry in 1976.

May the better bull win.

Martin Henry is a university administrator, communication specialist and public affairs analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.