Jamaica goes to the polls today in the shadow of Hurricane Dean - whose violent passage over the island nation actually delayed polling by eight days.

Jamaican politics have traditionally been bitter, two party, contests between the left-wing People's National Party, now in power since 1989, and the Jamaica Labour Party, which confusingly leans to the right of the political spectrum. The PNP is lead by Jamaica's first woman Prime Minister, Portia Simpson-Miller, a girl from Kingston's sprawling shanty town suburbs, who is probably Jamaica's first leader to come from outside the narrow confines of the islands plantocracy and squirearchy.

And when I say Jamaica's elections are bitter, I do mean bitter. More than 1,000 people died in political violence in the run-up to the 1980 general election, in a country with a population of barely two million. This year's contest has been much less violent, but with plenty of poison. Simpson-Miller is popular, especially with poorer Jamaicans, and considerably more popular than her party which looks tired, arrogant and corrupt after 18 years in power. Labour have decided to go for the head - attacking Simpson-Miller for being out of her depth as Prime Minister, in spectacularly nasty ads like the following - "Don't Draw Mi Tongue".



This is a high-risk strategy. Attacking a popular leader risks drawing out a sympathy vote, whereas attacking their unpopular party in a 'more in sorrow than in anger' sort of a way is difficult to defend - inevitably the leader has to distance herself from her underlings, and that creates all sorts of problems. Moreover, Simpson-Miller's "don't draw mi tongue" speech was made before she became Prime Minister in response to some pretty snobby, sneering remarks by Labour spokespeople. White or biracial, upper class, Labour spokespeople. In a country where class and racial (yes, between different shades of brown and black) divisions are acute as Jamaica, many poor, black, Jamaicans might well conclude that Portia was making an entirely justified response to the sort of class prejudice they face day and daily; "Sista P" was showing the plantocracy that she wasn't prepared to take any more crap, and was probably silently cheered by many poor Jamaicans who wished they had the opportunity to do the same thing.

The second ad I'm going to link to here, "Nat Changin' No Course" is cleverer, although still fairly negative - it links Portia to her corrupt and incompetent underlings while not suggesting any personal malfeasance on her part, and suggests that 18 years in power have made the PNP arrogant and complacent.



Nasty but focused on real incidents and I suspect fairly effective - much more so than direct personal attacks on the Prime Minister; the constant use of Portia's "Not Changing Course" overdub seems quite catchy; from what I've been reading on Jamaican political blogs it is actually quite catchy as well.

Like all first-past-the-post elections, today's election in Jamaica will be decided by a few thousand voters in a handful of marginal seats. Our final ad is from the knife-edge seat of Central Manchester, a place of grinding rural poverty and a traditional PNP stronghold. However, a long-serving PNP MP has retired and Labour have selected Sally Porteous, and active and effective local councillor who is more popular than here party. Her contest with the PNP's Peter Bunting, a long-term professional politician suffering from his lack of local roots but with a phenomenal local party organisation, could decide Jamaica's political future. This is a slick ad - presents a really positive view of Porteous (the lack of fire cover in the constituency has long been a personal hobby horse of hers), and shows Bunting, briefly, at his worst, and then shows Porteous above all that and only interested in representing the people.



Bunting's little slip about locking down Central Manchester shows how nasty Jamaican politics can be; lest anyone think this is a problem limited to one party, Labour's leader, Bruce Golding, has some extremely dubious gansta friends. This year's election has been more peaceful than any for decades, however, and let's hope for ordinary Jamaicans' sake it represents the start of a trend.