JAMAICA | 'The Party I Joined Is No Longer the Party I See Today': Councillor Quits JLP, Eyes PNP
From left Mayor Joel Williams, Councillor Tanyalee Williams and Member of Parliament Delroy Williams
May Pen North's Tanyalee Williams quits the Jamaica Labour Party, blames a broken relationship with her MP, and seeks a home in the PNP — a move that would break an 11–11 deadlock in the Clarendon Municipal Corporation.
MAY PEN, Jamaica, October 9, 2026 - In Clarendon this week, a single signature may prove to be worth an entire municipal corporation.
Councillor Tanyalee Williams, who has represented the May Pen North division for the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) since February 2024, has resigned from the party and says she has applied for membership in the People's National Party (PNP). If her switch is completed on the floor of the Clarendon Municipal Corporation (CMC), the 22-member body — currently deadlocked at 11 seats apiece — would tilt 12–10 in the PNP's favour, handing the Opposition the levers of local power in one of Jamaica's most fiercely contested parishes.
The letter
In a letter dated October 8, 2026, and addressed to JLP General Secretary Dr Horace Chang, Councillor Williams formally renounced her membership. According to The Gleaner, she wrote that she entered public life out of a commitment to honest service, fairness and putting ordinary people first, and that she had watched the party steadily drift from those values.
"My quarrel is with the direction the party has taken." — Councillor Tanyalee Williams, in her letter to the JLP
She was careful to wall off her grass-roots team from her grievance, saying she remained deeply indebted to the workers and supporters who campaigned alongside her in all weather. Her quarrel, she said, was with the direction the party had taken — and with the representation the constituency has received from its Member of Parliament.
The MP at the centre
That MP is Delroy Williams, the former Mayor of Kingston who sought and secured the JLP's candidacy in Clarendon Central ahead of the September 2025 general election. In an audio message to residents last week, the councillor traced the breakdown to that period, alleging that a faction of seasoned party operatives set out to undermine her, partly over how work in the division would be shared.
She told residents that these operatives had manipulated the MP, who in her words "doesn't know the space." She said he had blocked her phone number, leaving her to route her work reports through his secretary — copies of which, she said, she has kept as proof. Her efforts to mend the fence, she said, went nowhere.
These are serious allegations, and they are, for now, one-sided. The Gleaner reported that it was unable to reach the MP for comment. A first-term representative accused of being captured by his own handlers deserves the chance to answer — and his constituents deserve to hear that answer.
A crossing interrupted
Councillor Tanyalee Williams called on PNP President Mark Golding, her new Comrade Leader, this morning.
In a parish where a councillor named Williams is quarrelling with an MP named Williams before a mayor named Williams, the surname may be shared, but the political fortunes clearly are not.
The minority PNP caucus has signalled its intention to call a special meeting so the councillor can complete the process. A no-confidence motion against the mayor and his deputy, Clive Mundle, is also expected — the practical prize of any new majority.
The arithmetic of a hung council
The CMC's balance has been on a knife-edge for months. The JLP emerged from the February 2024 local government elections with a 12–10 majority. That cushion vanished after the death of JLP Councillor Marjorie McLeod-McFarlane of the Aenon Town division.
The by-election that followed was won by the PNP's Delroy Dawson, reclaiming the seat he had lost to her in 2024 and producing the 11–11 tie.
Floor-crossing is not new to Clarendon. Romaine Morris, then a JLP councillor for the Mocho division in Clarendon North Central, crossed to the PNP earlier and went on to retain his seat under the PNP banner in the 2024 polls — a precedent the councillor's supporters will no doubt cite, and one her detractors will insist must be tested at the ballot box.
The mandate question
That is the uncomfortable question at the heart of any defection: whose seat is it? Williams won May Pen North decisively in 2024, polling 1,404 votes to the PNP's Suzette Burrell's 543 — a margin of 861. JLP loyalists will argue that those voters chose a party ticket, not a free agent, and that the honourable course is to seek a fresh mandate. Her defenders will counter that residents elected a representative to deliver for them, and that a councillor frozen out by her own MP cannot do so.
There is a further wrinkle. The councillor herself disclosed that a second prospective JLP candidate had already emerged on the ground for the local government elections constitutionally due in 2028. Her critics may read that as a councillor jumping before she was pushed; her supporters will see it as confirmation of the very campaign against her that she describes. The truth may contain a measure of both.
What comes next
For the PNP, the prize is tangible: control of the mayoralty, the corporation's agenda and the visible delivery of parish services ahead of 2028. For the JLP, the loss would be more than a single seat — it would be a public airing of a constituency rift in a parish the party has long counted as fertile ground, and a test of how the governing party manages friction between newly elected MPs and the councillors beneath them.
For the residents of May Pen North, though, the questions are simpler. Will the roads be fixed, the drains cleared and the bushing done, whichever colour their councillor wears? The special meeting will settle the arithmetic. Only the next election will settle the verdict.
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