Dear Editor,

My oh my, former Prime Minister Liz Truss has set a record for being the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, if not in all of the Commonwealth.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party has got the dubious distinction of burning through multiple prime ministers and tanking the British economy with Brexit and other faulty policies, resulting in its economic collapse. In fact, the Indian economy is now larger than the British economy, despite the fact that India’s Human Development Index is not up to par, which indicates that if it were fully developed, it would eclipse the UK entirely. This must be karma for exploiting them through colonialism.

Still, I need to bring attention to the real crisis at hand, and that is the state of democracy. With this being the third or so prime minister who has resigned from office from the Conservative Party without fully completing a term, it shows that their talent pool is dwindling. This should echo loudly in Jamaica as we practise a Westminster parliamentary system, like Britain, not a Congressional system, like the US and other democracies, which can allow for multiple parties to provide their talents.

It can be seen that the People’s National Party (PNP) had its own crisis whereby Peter Phillips had to step down after the party lost the 2020 General Election following a leadership challenge. As far as the prospects for Mark Golding are concerned, if his party loses the local government elections, a coup d’etat may be in store for him. Similarly, while Prime Minister Andrew Holness is trying to do what he can, there seems to be a mismatch in ministerial posts and his talent pool of Members of Parliament (MPs). He has Minister Fayval Williams at the Ministry of Education when she’s better suited for the Ministry of Finance, and Horace Chang, who seems more suited for working alongside Health Minister Christopher Tufton, as minister of national security, a post I think should belong to a former superintendent, police commissioner, or commander of the Jamaica Defence Force.

Our dual party system of democracy is not prone to damage from lack of voter participation as that is a symptom of the real problem, the lack of talent. Should a party lose competent people and be forced to pick from a decreased pool of experts, then what that means is that the party would not only have a severe leadership crisis when it gets power as there is a lack of viable prime ministers and Cabinet members, but also a severe legitimacy crisis as political parties only live as long as they demonstrate that they are actually competent.

Should a third and fourth party be able to achieve power, the legitimacy crisis would be more evident as the duopoly would be broken and the parties would be subjected to free discourse instead of the sound of their own voices.

To save what’s left of our democracy, lest our country end up like the UK, where the liberal democrats might win and see a comfortable hold on power for a long time, just like the Jamaica Labour Party did to the PNP, should we become a republic, we should move to not only change the head of State title but to amend the constitution so that we create a system in which the executive and legislature are fully separated so that the executive can select outside experts as ministers instead of party insiders. We should also fashion the legislature after the Congressional rather than Westminster system to allow competing parties to challenge the mainstream parties lest they end up like the Conservative Party, which has ruined Britain but seems not to worry because they know that at some point they will be returned to office when everyone forgets about Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.

Marcus White

whitemarc918@gmail.com