Scott wants direct involvement in constitutional reform process

Spanish Town Mayor Norman Scott has labelled the lack of direct involvement of local government practitioners in the constitutional reform process as a miscalculation that should be corrected.

Scott, who is also a vice president of the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP), in speaking with The Gleaner, said local government representatives should have been named on the Constitutional Reform Committee from the outset.

“I want to make it clear [that] we want to engage, and we want to be a part of it, and we want to make an input because, while there has been legislation for reform, local government is not entrenched in the Constitution,” Scott reasoned, “By its entrenchment, no party will be able to use simple parliamentary majority to change or remove any municipal corporation outside of a referendum and no minister should have the sole authority over local government.”

Scott said local government, which is the oldest form of government coming out of the vestry system, should be autonomous in every way, giving municipal councils that are democratically elected total control over parish affairs.

According to Scott, the local government reform of 1993 stopped short of achieving this, so the direct involvement of municipal representatives on the committee would allow the positions to be articulated more succinctly.

Commenting on the concerns of the Spanish Town mayor, Raymond Pryce, the deputy information spokesman for the PNP, said Scott’s call was surprising but understandable.

“It is surprising because Mayor Scott is a vice president of the People’s National Party and should have known that two representatives from the party were named to the committee to reflect the Opposition’s input,” Pryce said, “I will say, however, that if it is coming from a place where the design of the republican constitution for Jamaica is not sufficiently ventilated within the various levels of management and leadership of the PNP, then I can understand.”

He noted that it has always been the position of the party that the entrenchment of local government in a republican constitution for Jamaica be a necessary feature, as it was reflected in the 2015 legislation that was passed in Parliament to entrench local government in the Constitution, but was not acted on.

During this period, Pryce, who believes that all positions of public offices should be elected and holders accountable to the electorate had long pushed for an incremental approach to the removal of vestiges of the monarchical legacy, leading up to a more robust constitutional reform debate. He said he believed this would stimulate interest on the part of the Jamaican people in the process. In his own private member’s motion that was passed, he had asked for the annual Throne Speech to be changed to the ‘People’s Speech’.

He said that, if the government at the time had pushed for the legislation that was passed by both houses of Parliament to be placed before the electors in a referendum, along with his own private member’s motion, the process of reform would be further ahead.

Pryce argued that his stance on an executive president elected by the people with a fixed period of two terms and the rights and freedoms of the citizenry be established in a Jamaican Constitution were among other provisions he ventilated in an article in 2016 after Prime Minister Andrew Holness signalled his intention to replace England’s monarch as head of state.

“Since these debates, in real terms we are further away from the road to a Jamaican republican constitution in my view,” Pryce opined.