Guest column - Will the COP Survive itself? (Mayday, Mayday...) - by Phillip Edward Alexander

Guest column by Phillip Edward Alexander reproduced from the blog PLAIN TALK

A friend of mine who tends to be a bit flamboyantly melodramatic if not sycophantic in his party's support was so overjoyed at the announcements made by the leadership of the Congress of the People after Sunday's National Council members meeting that he allowed his exuberance free run and referred to the party gleamingly as now being 'a ship back on the high seas.'

Funny thing is, from the moment Joseph Toney made his ill advised pronouncement on the morning of the genesis of all this, that the Mayor of San Fernando and political grasshopper extraordinaire Marlene Coudray had not only joined the UNC but was contesting a significant post in that Party's internal election (and one, by all accounts, sanctioned and endorsed by that party's leadership) I too started to think of the COP in terms of a ship. 

And from the tone of the UNC in response to Toney's statement I began ringing alarm bells to warn that this issue, like the proverbial iceberg it had the tendency to become, was showing only a small part of its potential for massive, unrecoverable destruction.

And, if one is to believe the unscripted nonsense that has taken place since that announcement, like the ill fated Titanic this analogy brings to mind, the leadership of the party all appeared unaware of the impending disaster and seemed to be steering towards it. 

Now one must be abundantly cautious that one does not appear inconsistent when one speaks politically, especially if one is in political leadership. For all their sound and fury over an issue that no one else outside the cloistered inner circle of umbrage are concerned about in the slightest, the leadership of the Congress of the People are relying on and quoting principles that they themselves freely abandoned without hesitation since elevation post May 24th 2010. 

To the public and the electorate there were many, many more pressing and urgent issuers of national importance to which this much significance should have been attached, and abandoning the nation on the pension issue, the Reshmi issue, the SOE and assassination plot issue, and then making the loss of a minor political position one of urgent national importance is as hypocritical and disingenuous as one could possible be.

And, if anything, this (last) weekend's national council meeting's announcements made the whole sordid mess even worse if such a thing were possible to contemplate mere days ago, because now the political leader appears to be dragging real national issues into the fray and is attempting to publicly disagree with a Prime Minister who appears uninterested in any of it, making one wonder, how long before Prakash & Co. are told 'if yuh doh like it leave?'

Seriously? Over a Mayorship? 

Somebody has to be spiking obeah tonic in the water being served up at COP headquarters, because nothing that I can fathom comes close to explaining the mass insanity that could have led them this close to tearing their own party apart over something that should have been handled in a strongly worded letter between leaders. 

Instead we find ourselves looking on at an unmanageable, practically irrecoverable situation with finite options put in place by people who mere weeks ago were trumpeting that the partnership was stronger than ever. 

At that time I (and others) were also warning the leadership that they were blurring the lines of the coalition by speaking on the UNC's behalf on the platform erected in the PM's defense during the 'vote of no confidence' campaign, but it seems some people need to feel to learn. Funny thing about history though, it almost tries to write itself. 

We all know that coalitions are notoriously unstable devices as more than anything else they require a harnessing of egos to survive, but surely the people making the decisions in this comedy of errors must realize by now that they have little or no public support in this matter. 

If we are to end as we began (with the same analogy), then launch the lifeboats, ring the alarm bells and get the women and children off first. Yes I will admit there is a microscopic, minuscule chance that they will succeed in this enterprise as stranger things have happened politically, but if I were to wager as to the outcome of this latest round of eye gouging and hair pulling, the writing is (tragically) already on the wall.

Guest column by Phillip Edward Alexander reproduced from the blog PLAIN TALK