On the 2020 General Elections
As an emerging political movement, we are paying close attention to the 2020 election. While we do not believe that there is much difference between the 2 major parties, the election season is a time when more people are actively making their demands from the government and when the parties try to appeal to them by presenting their policies. Debate is generated from this, including but also going beyond the parties and their respective supporters.
As such, we had decided that the election season is an appropriate time for us to present some of our positions to the public, even though our movement is not fielding any candidates in the election. The intention of this is to influence the national discourse where we can, and to attract persons with similar views to join or at least engage the movement.
Our movement consists of 7 groups at the moment, with 5 covering different areas of Jamaica and 2 being in the diaspora. Over 80 meetings have been held across these different groups since the start of the year. Based on the discussions we have held over the time that we have been around, the current leadership of the movement decided to compile its positions into a paper. This process started on August 12 and the final draft of the document was approved and and then circulated beginning on August 16.
You may have noticed some social media posts on topics like Food Security, Customs Policies, and the Exchange Rate; these were based on excerpts from that document. The paper also covers other areas like land use and approaches to urban/rural development and management, which we have not yet made any social media posts about but have been discussing internally within the movement.
To our surprise, an editorial was published by The Gleaner today; it criticised the 2 main parties for not focusing enough on certain issues which we have focused on, and it presented an analysis and took positions similar to ones that we have expressed. As far as we know, The Gleaner was not aware of our positions or influenced by them at all; nevertheless, it pleases us to see these things expressed, and it has motivated us to put more effort into making our positions more public.
As a young movement filled with mostly young people, we are cautious with expressing certain positions due to the defensive posture that politicians and leading academics may take when criticised or when they disagree. Going forward, we will be more bold to avoid the perception that we are practising Tailism.
We may even form an electoral arm/branch in the future to field candidates to represent the views of the movement and the interests of the communities that we organise in. This would challenge the 2 major parties and, whether or not we win any seats, force them to engage certain ideas and reform their own to adapt to a changing political landscape where they no longer have a duopoly.
The document that was written specifically for the 2020 General Elections is not the only thing we have done. We have been engaging the government at different points in time on several issues.
In 2017, we made a submission to the government in response to open calls for commentary on their National Poverty Policy green paper, and we engaged the government on minimum wage and the Sexual Offences Act.
In 2018, we submitted a paper with our general positions on economic issues at the time. This covers Customs Policies, the Exchange Rate, among other things.
In 2019, we sent 4 delegations to different events in Latin America and the Caribbean. We made a post on our site about this with links to some documents from these events. In our report on Venezuela in particular, we made a significant amount of commentary on things like social projects and economic policy which are very relevant to Jamaica as a ‘developing’ country in the Global South; it covered things like food security and currency stability which are major concerns for us.
This year, we made another submission on minimum wage, we made a presentation to parliament on workers’ rights and the Sexual Harassment Bill, and we gave our thoughts on the government’s handling of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.
We also pay keen attention to labour struggles. We caught media attention when we engaged the government on the Sexual Offences Act and the Sexual Harassment Bill, but our focus is evidently larger than that. The other parts of our work, especially the things on economic policy, have been overshadowed.
Separate from simply expressing political positions, we have also been planning social projects:
We worked with the Rebel Women Lit book club to donate over 1000 USD worth of books to women in prison and teenage mothers in residential state facilities.
We formulated a waste management project to serve communities where the government fails to collect garbage often enough, leaving communities with no choice but to either burn garbage or dump it in inconvenient places like gullies.
We have designed a gardening and communal production project for both urban and rural areas. We are working on gathering equipment and resources to kickstart this project.
We have synthesised the waste management project and the communal production project through a system that will incentivise and reward volunteer work in communities that will go beyond these 2 projects. We may have to delay the launch of these projects due to the worsening national situation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is difficult to go about social projects as a political movement because of the violent history of political turf wars, and because of the complications of a ‘political’ entity engaging entities that should be non-political like community associations, schools, churches, etc. - It is easier for persons from the 2 main political parties to engage these non-political entities because they can do it through the positions that they hold within the state, creating a strange blur of the line between political and non-political entities.
Even with the challenges we face, we press on. We will continue to organise our base, put our positions and ideas forward, do whatever work we can, and hope that these efforts contribute to improving life for Jamaican people.