Norman Manley, Michael Manley, P.J. Patterson and Portia Simpson Miller

FIFTY YEARS ago, the People's National Party (PNP) celebrated its 21st birthday and declared that it had come of age.

Today, the party wraps up its 71st annual conference with a public session at the National Arena. Political commentator Richard Crawford has said this occasion, 50 years after the party attained adulthood, must be one of soul searching.

"If Norman Manley were alive and were to address conference today, he would say, 'It is time to return to your roots'," Crawford tells The Sunday Gleaner.

The PNP, which was founded in 1938, is suffering from cracks in its ranks as a result of personal and philosophical differences. Despite being president of the party, Portia Simpson Miller is viewed as not commanding the respect and support of all members. The divide has resulted in one unprecedented yet unsuccessful challenge by her former deputy, Dr Peter Phillips.

"Norman Manley would not have envisaged where the PNP is today; he would not have envisaged where Jamaica is today," argues Crawford. "The PNP still has an unfulfilled mission. If they are to be true to their history and the vision of their founding fathers, the party must return fully to embrace those early ideological underpinnings."

When Manley spoke at its 21st annual conference, he told Comrades that the party had survived because it was the voice of the masses.

Manley would not be pleased

"If we had not succeeded in getting adult suffrage for Jamaica, if we had not succeeded in getting the ordinary man and woman, the poor and the humble - what I call the little people of the country - if we had not succeeded in giving them direct share and interest in the political life of this country, we would never have been a People's National Party in Jamaica," he said.

Crawford argues that the PNP that Manley formed is one he would not be pleased to embrace today.

"The formation of garrison politics, the whole violence in politics and corruption, are things that would leave him disappointed," Crawford reasons.

In the meantime, PNP stalwart Paul Burke says the pronouncements that the party had come of age might have been influenced by the fact that the party had just won its second general election. It had won the 1955 election and then a second term in the 1959 polls, which were held in July that year.

Burke says that Manley, if he were speaking at today's conference, would be urging the party to press on with constitutional reform and to redouble its effort to secure economic independence for Jamaican. He says that Manley would also be urging the party to renew itself.

"He would make it clear that the party does not exist to win elections, and he would be very explicit about that," Burke says.

He adds that Manley would have been disappointed that the party did not have the financial independence to drive its programmes.