THE recent release of classified information pertaining to the role of the British government in the overthrow of the democratically elected PPP government did not come as a surprise to most Guyanese, particularly those familiar with our political history. It is an established fact that the Jagan-led PPP was thrown out of office in 1953 after winning a landslide victory mainly because of its left-wing orientation and the felt need by the colonial administration to preserve the status quo of exploitation and subservience to  the planter class and foreign-owned and controlled commercial interests. The country at that time was a colony of Britain and there existed a symbiotic relationship between the Colonial Office and the planter/commercial class.

This explains why the constitution was suspended after only six months in office by the PPP in 1953 on the spurious ground that the PPP was seeking to establish a communist state in what was then British Guiana. The truth is that the PPP in keeping with its working-class predisposition had sought to democratise the labour movement by enacting a Labour Relations Bill which effectively would have allowed  unions enjoying majority support to be  recognized. This intended legislation was patterned after the Wagner Act in the USA and was essentially democratic in nature.

What the Colonial Office found objectionable in the Bill was the fact that it would have resulted in the recognition of the Guiana Industrial Labour Union (now GAWU) at the expense of the Man Power Citizen’s Asocciation, (MPCA), a company union which was highly unpopular among the vast majority of sugar workers.

The suspension of the 1953 constitution therefore had more to do with protecting the class interests of the planter/commercial class rather than with geo-strategic considerations. It is pertinent to note in this regard that the suspension of the British Guiana constitution preceded the Cuban Revolution of 1959 which debunked the argument advanced by some people  of the PPP wanting to set up a ‘ second Cuba ‘ in the western hemisphere. In other words, the suspension of the constitution was influenced by considerations that were more political and economic and not geo-strategic and ideological as some political analysts make it out to be.

It was only after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 that there was heightened interest on the part of the United States to pressure Britain to deny political independence to the colony under a PPP-led administration. This finally happened in 1966 after the PPP was engineered out of office in the 1964 elections under what Harold Wilson, a former British Prime Minister described as ‘a fiddled constitutional arrangement’.

Both Britain and the United States bear responsibility for the sad state the country found itself in during the dark days of dictatorial and authoritarian rule. It took the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War for the West to lend its support for democratic reforms in Guyana. A great injustice was done not only to the Jagans but to the people of Guyana for having had to endure twenty-eight years of undemocratic rule because of incorrect perceptions by the USA and Britain towards the PPP and its leaders.