BY DESMOND ALLEN Executive editor - special assignment allend@jamaicaobserver.com
Sunday, March 02, 2014
WHILE the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) was celebrating its revered founder Sir Alexander Bustamante last week, a Canadian-based Jamaican journalist was launching a scathing attack on the National Hero for Jamaica’s lack of progress.
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| Michael Manley (PNP |
Against the backdrop of the 130th anniversary of Sir Alexander’s birth, commemorated by the Opposition party on February 24, Ewart ‘Fats’ Walters said Jamaica would have been much farther ahead if Bustamante had not split from the People’s National Party (PNP) and damaged the national movement.
“Jamaica could have been much farther ahead now, had William Alexander Bustamante remained as a supporter of the national movement in which Norman Manley’s People’s National Party played a major role, and not the adversary he became,” Walters wrote in the prologue to his latest book, We Come From Jamaica - The National Movement 1937-1962, 2014.
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| Norman Manley (L) and Bustamante (R) |
Walters said that many Jamaicans had recognised that the two-party system divided the country and fractured the national unity that attended the discussions and activities that began in the late 1930s. The Westminster system of government, derived from the British, created an artificial fractiousness that left the losing party to “oppose, oppose, oppose” regardless, he argued.
“The exciting spirit of creativity, volunteerism and togetherness that was fomented by the movement towards nationhood was blunted the moment in 1943 that Bustamante was persuaded by the British to keep Manley in check by forming his Jamaica Labour Party,” Walters said.
Walters, who is remembered for the time when he was deputy editor of the now defunct Jamaica Daily News, also quoted another author, Obika Gray, who wrote Demeaned but Empowered, blaming Bustamante for the introduction of political violence in Jamaica. more
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