By Howard Walker, Staff Reporter 
Seaga
THE JAMAICA Labour Party's (JLP) 60th Conference has come and gone but in speeches before and after the deputy leaders' elections, party leader Edward Seaga created a storm and once again the internal squabble that dogged the party for years surfaced.
At the conference he urged delegates to vote with their heads and not their pockets, suggesting that persons were trying to buy leadership position with money obtained from questionable sources. But the delegates stood firm and ousted the incumbents Edmund Bartlett and Olivia 'Babsy' Grange in the process.
Here are a few of the previous JLP quarrels:
In 1990, the 'Gang of Five' comprising Ed Bartlett, Errol Anderson, Karl Samuda, Pearnel Charles and Douglas Vaz came together out of concern that their telephones, they claimed, were tapped when they were Mr. Seaga's ministers in the 1980s.
They declared that their fight was with the undemocratic manipulation of the machinery and constitution of the Labour Party. They did not want Seaga to resign, they just wanted him to change his dictatorial style.
That did not happen, and he forgave them for their accusations and suggested that they "light a candle, sing a Sankey and find your way home". Bartlett, Samuda and Charles found their way home.
In 1995, there was a more direct challenge to Mr. Seaga's leadership from The Western Eleven led by Brascoe Lee and other caretakers from western Jamaica. That group said the JLP would not win another election as long as Mr. Seaga was leader.
Also in 1995, Bruce Golding departed from the party to head a newly formed National Democratic Movement (NDM). The Gang of Five outbreak and the saga of the Western Eleven had helped to push him in that direction plus Mr. Seaga's statement that no one else was capable of leading the party.
In the 1995 move to dislodge Mr. Seaga as leader of the party, he had said that if he got 70 per cent of the votes from a poll among delegates, he would remain as leader. At the end of the poll he received 79 per cent and declared, "The argument done. Finish. Anybody else who wants to raise this argument meet me on the floor of conference."
In 1999, another challenge came around that disrupted party proceedings. The form of this challenge was to position change agents in important positions in the party's second level leadership. Pearnel Charles challenged Audley Shaw for the deputy leadership of Area Three, a position left vacant by the suspension of Mike Henry for disciplinary reasons.
That election exposed the main players Hugh Shearer, Mike Henry, Karl Samuda and the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU) openly backed Charles while Seaga openly backed Shaw. Ed Bartlett was managing Shaw's campaign, echoing the view that Charles and Henry were too old.
In the elections, Charles lost marginally to Shaw and Samuda lost his general secretary position to Dr. Ken Baugh.
