Mr Peter Bunting, the shadow national security minister, made a measured and mostly thoughtful intervention in Parliament last week on issues affecting his portfolio and, in particular, the problem of crime in Jamaica.

Among the issues highlighted by Mr Bunting as demanding of urgent attention is the nexus between politics and crime, so as to provide legitimacy and support to the broader assault on criminality in the country.

Mr Bunting is, of course, not singular in his concern. For this relationship, while perhaps not as organically structured as in the past, remains, many insist, residually strong and has been the subject of many reports on crime in Jamaica. The most recent of these was the task force that was headed by Colonel Trevor MacMillan, the retired army officer who also served as commissioner of police and had a brief stint in the current administration as national security minister.

Mr Bunting argued, however, that not enough has been done to deal with the issue and, as an example, recalled last year's incident at the annual conference of the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) at the National Arena when one man was shot dead, just behind the stage on which sat Prime Minister Golding and most of his Cabinet and senior party officials. The claim was that the incident might have involved people supposedly providing 'security' at the conference.

We, like Mr Bunting and many other Jamaicans, are concerned at the seeming absence of any official or formal report by the police, or the JLP, up to now on this incident and insist that it is high time that the Jamaica Constabulary Force provide a credible update on the status of its investigation and whether an arrest is imminent. The JLP, too, owes it to supporters, including the thousands of people who turned up at the National Arena, and to all Jamaicans, to explain, truthfully, what happened that Sunday afternoon.

For, as we have often said, political parties are not private clubs whose affairs are internal to themselves. When a party seeks and wins state power, its representatives command not only public resources, but have substantial power over people's lives, which is demanding of public confidence and trust.

But Mr Bunting did concede that criminals attach themselves to both major political parties, which accepts that the Opposition People's National Party (PNP), too, has issues to confront. And this is where Mr Bunting's analyses and prescriptions were lacking.

Influential

Peter Bunting is general secretary of the PNP, a senior and influential position that gives him control of the party's operational machinery. Mr Bunting spoke of national initiatives to be undertaken to fight criminality in Jamaica, including some in which bipartisan efforts are in train.

What, however, was glaringly absent from his presentation was what specifically was being done by the PNP, and his own efforts, to remove people of criminal taint and other undesirables from within either its corridors of authority or the periphery of power.

If Mr Bunting takes more than a cursory glance, he will notice the hard and tainted figures who enjoy more than spectral relationship and influence within his party. Some may even sit, or have sat, in high councils of the party. There are, too, hard men of open violence, secure in their place on the periphery.

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