Daraine Luton, Staff Reporter

THE PEOPLE'S National Party (PNP) will have to clearly define and enunciate its plans, programmes and philosophy to Jamaicans if it is to recapture the hearts of the majority of the nation's voters, head of the party's youth arm, Damion Crawford, says.

Crawford, president of the People's National Party Youth Organisation (PNPYO), tells The Sunday Gleaner that the PNP has lost its ideological compass. He says the party needs to reconnect with Jamaicans or else its political fortunes might not improve.

"We are the party that has always done, and is most likely to do, things for the poor and working class of this country. However, we have been caught, like many other parties that were left of centre, in the hypocrisy of the capitalist state and the capitalist media, and by extension, we have come too much to the centre," Crawford says.

Bruising defeat

He adds: "We have come so far to the centre that the electorate cannot differentiate us from the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and so they will vote for anything, whether it is a lighter colour or the offer of money."

Comments by the PNPYO president come against the background of the party's defeat to the governing JLP in the West Portland by-election last Monday. PNP candidate, Kenneth Rowe, suffered a bruising defeat at the hands of the JLP's Daryl Vaz.

The PNP hierarchy spent the three weeks prior to the by-election in Portland, whipping up support for Rowe. PNP president Portia Simpson Miller hardly missed a day in the constituency, but Rowe lost by over 2,000 votes. Rowe polled 5,626 to Vaz's 7,915.

The by-election loss follows the PNP's defeat in the 2007 general election, which was followed by a loss to the JLP in the local-government elections.

Crawford says the problem facing the party is that it is "not sufficiently differentiated in our policies and we are not sufficiently differentiated in our messages".

"We have to address that or else we are going to be in trouble," the PNPYO president says.

Arguing that the PNP is experiencing great difficulty in swaying voters in an era where he says many persons seem willing to sell their votes, Crawford says the ideological underpinning of a better tomorrow must be the clear trumpet call of the PNP if fortunes are going to change.

Future benefits

"The party needs to give people something to believe in. If you cannot compete with the finances, if you cannot compete with the ability to issue and create a certain environment by capital, then the party must have something that people can believe in.

"If people do not believe that (support for the party) will carry future benefits, whether directly or indirectly, then they will be satisfied with immediate benefits."

Lamenting what he calls a disconnect between the party and Jamaicans, the PNPYO president says the PNP must never be reduced to a mere election machinery.

"You cannot have the PNP alive for a few weeks before the election. It must be alive for the entire period. We have to go back to the period where we are not only fighting for an election but for a standard of living and a way of life," Crawford says.

He adds: "The YO must take full responsibility for the movement of the party back to what we were ideologically, and back to a level of work that is constant and persistent, and not only based on winning an election."

daraine.luton@gleanerjm.com.