Brown Burke sounds alarm after second ‘Riser’ quits PNP

Following the exit of a second councillor from the People’s National Party (PNP) last week, former vice-president of the party, Angela Brown Burke, is lashing out against the treatment meted out to some party supporters and loyalists.

This comes after John’s Hall division’s Faith Sampson Nickle crossed the floor of the Manchester Municipal Corporation and joined the minority Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) last Thursday.

“I don’t believe persons just step out of one party to join another. I think when this happens, we have to do some introspection.

“Too often we take each other for granted, as if some contributions are more valuable than others. Too often we ignore the concerns of others and expect them to ‘forget about it’ just because we say so,” Brown Burke wrote on Facebook in the aftermath.

STRAINED RELATIONSHIP

Eyebrows were raised when Sampson Nickle crossed the floor, but The Gleaner understands that the councillor and Member of Parliament for North West Manchester Mikael Phillips, in whose constituency the division is located, had a strained relationship.

Things got worse, according to the councillor, when she chose to support Peter Bunting in the September 2019 PNP presidential election. Bunting later lost to Mikael’s father, Peter Phillips.

Brown Burke was stripped of her portfolio responsibilities in a reshuffled PNP shadow cabinet after she led a strident campaign against Phillips as director for Peter Bunting’s Rise United campaign.

“We cannot take each other for granted and we shouldn’t take each other for granted either,” Brown Burke, the South West St Andrew member of parliament, stressed.

Sampson Nickle has not been the only one who supported Bunting in the September race to have left the PNP.

Kari Douglas, councillor for the Trafalgar division in South East St Andrew, back in February shocked political watchers after she joined the JLP, also in the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation.

The PNP, on both counts, said the councillors were being replaced because of low political support.