Robert Buddan, Contributor

The People's National Party has already taken two important steps towards renewal - an assessment of why it lost the general elections a year ago (The Meeks Report), and settling its leadership question two weeks ago.

These are largely internal party matters that nonetheless have obvious national importance. What it must now do is move towards demonstrating how it is relevant to the nation and why it should be considered a government-in-waiting. That calls for renewing the party's objectives.

Renewal can, and usually involves changes in, or a recommitment to the original goals and philosophies by the leadership of an organisation or nation in ways relevant to the times. It also involves removing the abuses of the organisation and the forces that have been responsible for them, since it is usual for organisations to be captured by interests hoping to serve their own objectives through the organisation. It therefore takes boldness, confidence, and a strong sense of purpose by the organisation to renew itself.

The PNP well knows much of what it has to do as an organisation. It has produced the C20th Mission Report under Peter Phillips and P.J. Patterson, the Plan of Action for Transforming and Rebuilding the Party under P.J. Patterson, and the Meeks Report under Portia Simpson Miller. They provide a comprehensive review and reassessment of what is wrong and of what can be done. The party now needs to distil these reports in order to identify what the priority areas should be, and what can be practically achieved in light of the state of mind of the party and the state of the country.

MISSION AND PROGRAMME

The grand mission of the party has been (1) independence (2) social and economic justice (3) new governance under globalisation, and (4) achieving developed country status for Jamaica. These have comprised the mission under Norman and Michael Manley and P. J. Patterson and Portia Simpson Miller. Each stage, of course, has faced different international and national conditions. These have placed limits on what could be achieved. This makes it all the more important to have leadership that can read the circumstances and conditions of the moment and plan and strategise accordingly.

It appears that the PNP has a maximum and a minimum programme at the moment. The maximum programme is to make Jamaica achieve developed or First World country status by 2030. That was the mission around which the Millennium Projects like highways, and others like oil exploration, creating an information society, establishing social partnerships, undertaking public sector reform, initiating an industrial policy, pursuing poverty reduction, planning for local government reform, promoting educational transformation, and other major programmes were conceived.The minimum programme is the one discerned since the party has been in opposition. It is for Jamaica to protect the social and other gains achieved over the years against the onslaught of the hostile environment of oil price rises, the food crisis, and climate change and from failure by the JLP government to adequately address these.

As an opposition, we would expect the party to attack any evidence of waste, corruption, incompetence and misallocation that contribute to the erosion of these gains. I believe Simpson Miller might be credited with anticipating the cost of living crisis and sensitising her party to thinking about how best to protect the gains the people have enjoyed. That message must have helped her re-election as party president, since so many are affected by the immediacy of the price crisis. As a government-in-waiting the party has to say how it intends to reposition itself on the course to make Jamaica into a First World country by 2030, and realise the goals of its 2007 manifesto towards that end. That mission, however, has to be credited to P.J. Patterson, Peter Phillips, and others from whom it was inherited. Simpson Miller has taken that mission onboard. It is here that Phillips and others who contributed to this mission should continue to have a vital role in coming years.

POLITICS OF RENEWAL

The early PNP had been motivated by an anti-colonial agenda that saw Jamaica's problem as the exploitation of country by country (Britain and its colonies), and of 'man by man', mostly in class and racial terms. By the 1980s, a new politics had started to emerge globally. Much of its sentiments came to influence the PNP without always being part of the party's mainstream. Exploitation had come to be seen more broadly as the exploitation by man of nature (environmentalism), and by man of woman (gender politics). New forms of advocacy also emerged against the exploitation by children of adults (child's rights), and the way the business culture of commercialism, greed and consumerism exploited society by promoting wrong values.

BROADER MOVEMENT FOR CHANGE

The movement for change had become broader than the old PNP and parties like the PNP and other socialist parties (the British Labour Party included), had now sometimes come to be seen as part of the problem rather than the solution.

They became part of the problem when they compromised too much with the capitalist and corporate classes taking money from them and giving them business licences to exploit people and environment in the name of liberalisation. They became part of the problem when they were male-dominated patriarchal organisations whose politics was too aggressive and violent. Parties were part of the problem when they used the state to exploit people and benefit themselves.

New social movements like environmental, women, children, anti-poverty, and anti-globalisation movements emerged outside of the parties and engaged issues on their own. Parties the world over often continued to function in the old way while fewer people voted, joined, and worked on their behalf. They were slow to reorganise and renew themselves because the old forces that had captured their organisations had so entrenched themselves that the leaders did not have broad enough will to defeat and remove those forces.

Many new parties no longer use labels like 'labour', 'socialist', 'federal', 'republican', 'liberal' or 'national' as older parties did. Some use labels like 'green' (environmental parties), or 'renewal' to distance themselves from the traditional parties and their tarnished image. There are, for example, the Japan Renewal Party, the National Renewal Alliance (of Brazil), and the African Independence and Party-Renewal (of Senegal).

PARTIES

There is no question of the importance of parties to democracy. An American political scientist, E. Schatteneider, wrote as long ago as 1942 when parties were enjoying better days, that political parties created democracy and modern democracy was unthinkable without political parties.

Without parties there can be no organised and coherent politics, and without this there can be no accountable democracy.

However, what parties like the PNP must do is take the opportunity to look carefully at how candidates are selected and financed, and who governments give favours to in exchange for what.

The PNP - and any party for that matter - should not always be so focused on winning elections. It should try to get its organisation and objectives right to be in the best position to serve people. Those who have captured the organisation, whether they are political careerists, corporate thieves or criminals, should go. This is what Portia Simpson Miller must make sure to do.

Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.