Embattled
People’s National Party (PNP) General Secretary Paul Burke on Sunday circulated a report in which he scolded members of his party for being self-centred and failing to communicate what he described as “simple, clear, and credible messages emanating from an ideological position”.
According to Burke, who has been under fire for his stewardship of the Opposition party’s secretariat, members of the National Executive Council, the Executive Committee, and national officers need to accept and share responsibility and blame for the PNP’s failure to establish a code of conduct and sanctions in spite of several approved conference resolutions to that effect and the absence of codified by-laws.
He charged that the party had not sustained a meaningful and ongoing political education programme. “This, in my view, is why members and known party supporters put their own personal agenda and concerns in the public domain, whether through traditional or social media. In short, we cannot reap what we have not sown and we are paying the political price,” Burke wrote in his political report dated March 2015, a copy of which was e-mailed to the
Jamaica Observer yesterday.
The political report was part of Burke’s General Secretary’s Report which he circulated to PNP members on Sunday.
“All of us are extremely concerned about the state of the organisation, obviously impacted on by the challenging economic situation, fortunately now steadily improving, on the Jamaican people, including many of our members,” Burke wrote.
“We are also concerned and must decisively act on the erosion of conventions, non-compliance with the rules of the party’s constitution, and deficiencies in our values and attitudes and our sense of sheer decency. The killings and sexual abuse of our children, not new, is one such reflection of this situation,” he said.
According to Burke, the commitment by the party’s leaders at all levels to the PNP and its objectives needs to be strengthened. “We must always be mindful of the only purpose why this movement was established in September 1938 was to serve the best interest of the widest cross section of the Jamaican people; and as Comrade Norman Manley declared at the 1938 launch of the People’s National Party: ‘It is called the people’s party because it will unswervingly aim at all those measures which will serve the masses of the country. I have already indicated a line of cleavage. It is perfectly true that the interests of all classes of people are bound together.
‘But it is equally true that there is a common mass in this country whose interest must predominate above and beyond all other classes, because no man is democratic, no man is a sincere and honest democrat who does not accept the elementary principle that the object of civilisation is to raise the standard of living and security of the masses of the people. If you do not agree with that principle, then you are playing with the words when you talk about democratic politics’.”
Said Burke: “It is because we lack a true sense of purpose, or we have forgotten, why we lack the commitment, discipline and humility and why members of this party believe that their own personal positions are more important to be aired in the wider public, rather than seeking redress through the structures of the party.”
Burke was obviously making reference to a number of public squabbles, including on social media, between PNP officials during bitter candidate selections in several constituencies that divided the party last year.
He said that Comrades needed to understand the PNP’s philosophy and argued that there is a nexus between words and the terms the party has used over the years with its political work and the direction and performance of the Government of Jamaica which the party formed at the time of the report.
He listed the words and terms as Participatory Democracy; Progress; We Put People First, which was a highlight of the 1989 manifesto; The Progressive Agenda; People Power; Empowerment; Sustainable Economic Growth; Prosperity For All; and A Better Quality Of Life For All, which was in the 1997 manifesto.
“We need to get back to some simple messages,” Burke said, as he reminded Comrades that the principles of the PNP which were committed to Jamaicans 30 years ago included democratic socialism.
