Phillips: I can beat Holness
Published:Tuesday | March 10, 2020 | 12:25 AMEdmond Campbell/Senior Staff Reporter
President of the People’s National Party (PNP), Dr Peter Phillips, has pushed back against critics who assert that he does not have the mettle to lead his party to victory in the upcoming general election.
Phillips dismissed the claim that he could not wrest Jamaica House from the Holness administration.
“Suffice it to say, we are not going to change leadership now. We are going to fight the election and I have every confidence that we will win the election,” Phillips said yesterday during an interview with The Gleaner.
Prime minister and leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Andrew Holness, has given hints that he might send Jamaicans to the polls before the general election that is constitutionally due early next year. The party’s chairman, Robert Montague, declared on Sunday that the JLP was ready to contest the election.
An RJRGLEANER-commissioned Don Anderson poll revealed that while the PNP has narrowed the gap on the ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), the latter enjoys an eight-percentage-point lead.
When asked which political party they would vote for if a general election were called, 30 per cent of respondents said the JLP, while 22 per cent said they would give the PNP the nod. Last year when Anderson conducted a similar poll, 29 per cent said that they would vote for the JLP, while 18 per cent said that they would support the PNP.
Yesterday, Phillips responded to the findings of an earlier Anderson poll that positioned him as the worst-performing opposition spokesman. Phillips said that it was the first time he had seen a poll that ranked the opposition leader as a spokesperson.
The PNP president said that he had never “quarrelled with individual pollsters on their technique or methodologies”, but noted that polls, at best, were snapshots in time. In an apparent jab at Anderson, he said that many polls worldwide and locally have not fared well in terms of accuracy and predictions. According to Phillips, for the last three general elections, local polls have not borne out their predictions.
“It is data that you have to take into account at a particular point in time, but more importantly, as far as political organisation is concerned, you need to continue to do the organisational work, to find the proper candidates, to define a policy position to work out how to communicate this policy position effectively, and to move forward,” Phillips reasoned.
He hailed the work of parliamentary committees chaired by the Opposition such as the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee, the Public Accounts Committee, and the Internal and External Affairs Committee.
Phillips argued that based on the overall work that was being done by the Opposition, he was confident that the PNP was “not only in a strong position, but will be victorious” in the upcoming polls.
Admitting that there were deficiencies in the party’s communication strategy, especially on social media, Phillips said that help was being sought from outside the ranks of the party to increase its effectiveness on those platforms.
He conceded that the ruling JLP was more visible on social media having “much more resources to devote”.
“The Jamaica Labour Party has done a very sophisticated linkage between what I would call governmental communication and party communication,” suggesting a strategic commingling of public resources with partisan motives.
“There is a tremendous and notable act of coordination between ministries which have their PR campaigns, ministers which have their PR campaigns, the official apparatus of the JIS – they have done a job with tremendous resources that keep the things in front.”
However, Phillips said that the Government’s public relations efforts have now come face to face with the reality being experienced by Jamaicans.
He said that the economic growth, the failed five-in-four “hype”, had now been “confronted with the sharp reality that the average rates of growth have lowered from what they have inherited”.