We shan't hold our breath, for doing the right or sensible thing is not often the preferred choice of Jamaican political parties.

Yet, we hope that Prime Minister Bruce Golding's declaration on Sunday that "we have some house cleaning to do" was more than an involuntary and spontaneous reaction to sheer fright, forgotten once the panic has passed.

For political parties, if they are to be more than mere rustlers of votes, satisfying only the form of democracy, can't be built on a base of the loudest, the baddest and most unthinking and lumpen, with a tiny elite at the apex. That is a recipe for the continued erosion of the Jamaican state and, ultimately, its failure.

Sunday's shooting incident at the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) conference at the National Arena - that cost the life of one man and injury to others - was just another step towards this abyss, from which we dearly hope Mr Golding can begin to cause us to veer.

Failure of planning

We are so inured to violence in Jamaica and demanding nothing big or profound of political leadership in the country, that we are inclined to see what happened at the arena as merely a failure of planning and security, which it was. But it represented something more fundamental: the essential nature of our parties and the beasts into which they have become.

Indeed, even Mr Golding - who once was so horrified by this evolution to have, for a time, removed himself from the process - seems to have again largely found accommodation in the environment until being shaken back to reality on Sunday.

How else, therefore, to explain his seemingly sincere observation, as if it was a profound aberration, that it was the first time since attending JLP conferences since 1968 that something of the nature of the killing, which took place just behind the stage on which he and half his Cabinet sat, had happened. That either the JLP or the Opposition People's National Party (PNP) was previously spared from such an event was most likely due to providence and luck than the nature of their being.

After all, Mr Golding himself used to highlight the fact that the parties emerged as facilitators of thuggishness and incivility for which Jamaica now pays a heavy price through the balkanisation of urban, inner-city communities into zones of exclusions, where colour-coded garrisons are enforced by armed thugs.

Beholden to ringmasters

These hard men of violence may no longer feed so much on the largesse of the state or are beholden to ringmasters on high. But their links with the parties remain more than tangential. They help to shape the nature of the institutions that compete for the management of the Jamaican state.

Indeed, it is no accident that the Jamaican middle and intellectual classes have largely retreated from active political participation at the party level. Nor is it coincidental that, as was the complaint during the PNP's recent leadership contest, 'bought' delegates from paper groups have the greatest influence over the selection of top leaders. Mr Golding, in his restructuring, has to find ways to re-engage the middle classes, without whom it is possible to win elections, but improbable to govern effectively.

But this problem of being overtaken by lumpenism is not only the JLP's, as the PNP's leadership knows.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.