Dwight Nelson, Gleaner Writer

May pen, Clarendon:

People's National Party (PNP) Vice-President Dr Peter Phillips has lashed out against claims of vote buying as his campaign team gears up to challenge Portia Simpson Miller for the party presidency at its annual conference in September.

Phillips was addressing party supporters at York Town Primary School during a divisional conference in Clarendon on Wednesday night.

"I hear today that a man who, as far as I know, was with the governing Jamaica Labour Party a little while aback is now talking about my campaign is buying votes or paying people to vote," Phillips said. "Whether it is in my constituency, or anywhere else in the country, I have never paid a Comrade or any other Jamaican to exercise their choice."

He also urged supporters to allow the contest in the PNP to take place in the spirit of genuine democracy and to put away the "nonsense" that was currently taking place.

Rights respected

Phillips, in his address, argued that members of the PNP under past leaders had the privilege to question their leader about what was being done by the party and their rights were respected.

He also used the platform to call for a stop to what he claimed was the spreading of untruths and the misrepresentation of party members by others. He said the leadership contest should be about ideas and not personalities as it was now time for the people to reach out to a higher kind of vision of what Jamaica and the PNP could be.