Robert Buddan IN THE elections of 1989, Hugh Shearer retained his seat by only four votes. He had known that the seat was too close to call. He had asked Carl Stone to do a constituency poll and Stone had told him that much.
It would have been an embarrassing defeat for a one-time prime minister to lose his seat to a little known PNP candidate. It was as though the PNP did not intend to unseat Mr. Shearer but there was a national swing against the JLP. Mr. Shearer could have done what some other politicians have done. He could have used the thuggery of henchmen to make sure he clearly won the seat. He didn't. He left it to the voters and barely made it. That was one of his greatest democratic acts and an example for all to follow. He eventually lost his seat in 1993 and gracefully retired from political life.
Hugh Shearer's political life spanned the first fifty years of Jamaica's modern political system. When the book is written about his life, it will tell us more about how this system came to be consolidated. A few years ago I suggested to a colleague who had access to Mr. Shearer that he should raise the subject of a biography with him. He said Mr. Shearer was interested but at the time did not know of anyone he could trust to tell his story properly. What would this story say?
This story would show that throughout his career, Hugh Shearer respected electoral democracy, defended workers rights as a legislator and a union man, practised bipartisanship by supporting PNP legislation for workers rights, and supported the convergence between the PNP and JLP on policies that favoured market and labour rights. The story will show that by taking these positions, Hugh Shearer played a decisive role in consolidating Jamaica's party and parliamentary systems in its formative years.
BITU/JLP ACTIVIST
Hugh Shearer was a founding member of our system of representation. He made his political debut in the 1947 local government elections, the first local elections under adult suffrage. He won a seat as a councillor. He joined Alexander Bustamante (Mayor of the KSAC) and L.G. Newland (General Secretary of the BITU, Deputy Mayor and later Mayor) among the leaders of the BITU (he was Assistant General Secretary) who had become important in the politics of the young JLP. Even as early as 1947, Shearer was regarded as Bustamante's protégé and heir-apparent in the BITU. However, Shearer's rise in the BITU went more smoothly than his rise in representative politics.
He lost his first general election contest in 1949.
Bustamante had won the Western Kingston seat in 1944 when the JLP swept the elections. But, Ken Hill organised the urban proletariat and the alliance of the PNP and the Trade Union Council (TUC) was such that Bustamante felt safer going to a sugar belt constituency in Southern Clarendon. The Western Kingston seat was left to Shearer in 1949 but Ken Hill won it for the PNP.
Hill was expelled from the PNP in 1952 and Shearer won the Western Kingston seat in 1955. He became a great asset to Bustamante when the JLP went into the opposition in those elections.
Between 1955 and 1958 he made many proposals in the legislature to provide severance pay for workers with long service who were dismissed or retrenched, and for holidays with pay for domestic workers. Some of this was designed to embarrass the PNP/NWU alliance but between 1955 and 1961, Hugh Shearer put workers' rights above politics by supporting much of the PNP legislation for labour.
These included legislation establishing the Pensions Authority, the Sugar Workers Pension Fund, amendments to the Holidays with Pay Law, and the Trades Disputes (Arbitration and Enquiry) Law.
In these years in opposition, Shearer became one of the front-line members of the JLP in the Jamaican legislature. He, along with Bustamante, Donald Sangster, Edwin Allen and Rose Leon were quick to point to those PNP policies that supported the emerging private sector market and those favouring labour as evidence of the convergence in policies between the two parties.
The JLP represented a combination of free enterprise and labour rights and the PNP considered itself socialist, favouring a role for the state planning and an advocate of labour policies.
The fact that the parties had a common ground in the labour movement and accepted the market for either ideological or pragmatic reasons provided grounds for this convergence and evidence of strong continuity in policies.
But Shearer, Sangster and
others did more than this. They provided thoughtful advice to the ageing Bustamante and represented a new guard of more professional JLP parliamentarians. In this regard, they led the way to the emergence of a new generation of leaders in the JLP who grew in stature as accomplished parliamentarians in their own right.
Despite this, Shearer lost his seat in the 1959 elections as the PNP grew in strength, especially in Kingston and St. Andrew where Shearer's seat was
located.
This loss meant that the JLP/BITU representatives were reduced to just Bustamante and Newland in the legislature. It signalled a shift in the character of the JLP. The union representatives begun to give way to more business and professional middle class leaders.
SHEARER AND MANLEY
But Shearer was able to concentrate more on trade union matters. For instance, in 1959, as Island Supervisor of the BITU, himself, Bustamante and Michael Manley brought the NWU and BITU together for a joint strike against the sugar employers as they attempted to divide and tribalise workers.
These were the early days of a unique political friendship between Shearer and Manley, one that held the workers' movement together at times when colonial Governors, business interests, and other forces tried to divide this movement. As Manley's biographer said, 'Shearer and Manley have shared a friendship which has survived sometimes bitter union and
political struggles'.
Shearer and Manley, we well know, graduated from senators to prime ministers. The JLP underwent transitions of leadership in parliament upon Bustamante's retirement.
The mantle first passed to Donald Sangster but after his sudden death, Bustamante steered the succession in favour of Shearer to preserve the labour wing of the party from encroachment by the business wing. But the business class in the party had become too strong and Shearer could not fend them off. Some say the white and brown Jamaican upper class even resented the fact that Jamaica had a black prime minister.
Furthermore, a new and more radical post-Independence generation had become severely critical of the white bias and social inequality of the society.
Shearer's administration was successful in strengthening economic growth and modernisation. But as the gap between rich and poor widened, his critics began to refer to him as 'Pharaoh' and as 'Share-out'. The real turning point came with the Rodney Riots in 1969. The Shearer government alleged that the government could possibly be overthrown.
CENSORING LITERATURE
It overreacted by limiting rights to march and censoring radical literature. The government was so disconnected from the popular mood that it thought it would have been returned in 1972. A Carl Stone survey of 1971 showed that 52 per cent of Corporate Area citizens were interested in a third party and it was Michael Manley's revitalisation of the PNP in that period that stabilised the two-party
system.
Hugh Shearer's government was voted out in 1972 and he resigned as JLP leader in 1974 under pressure from others wishing to take over the party. But in the ideologically polarised period of the 1970s, Hugh Shearer remained the one branch in the JLP that Michael Manley could reach out to for bipartisan understanding. Edna Manley summed up that, 'Busta and Norman in spite of their faults never broke faith over agreements'. Shearer and Michael all through the union struggle and politically 'never broke faith with each other'. She thought Edward Seaga was out of character with this tradition.
BUILT BY LABOUR
Hugh Shearer continued to serve in government in the 1980s but one of his greatest achievements has been to detribalise the workers' movement by his work in building the Joint Confederation of Trade Unions (JCTU).
When the JLP won the elections of 1980, its most popular figure was Hugh Shearer and its most popular slogan was 'Built by Labour', a slogan Shearer invented. It is an apt title for any book on his life and times, a life that was built by labour and devoted to a Jamaica built by labour.
It is a strange coincidence that Mr. Shearer should pass away at the same time that Mr. Seaga has said he will resign as JLP leader. A Stone poll in 1990 showed that Hugh Shearer was the person Jamaicans believed was the best person to replace Mr. Seaga as leader of the JLP.
* Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. E-mail: Robert.Buddan@ uwimona.edu.jm
