Paul Hardy, the leader of the Guyana Action Party (GAP), says that the relationship with the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) with which it formed an electoral alliance to contest the March 2001 elections, is unchanged from the day it was formed.

This view is corroborated by the WPA’s Desmond Trotman, even though he says that probably before the next elections the leadership of the two parties would have to sit down to review the relationship.

Speaking with the Stabroek News at the GAP’s Anira and Oronoque Streets headquarters, Hardy said that the relationship was the very same one that the two parties had created from the inception of the alliance.

“We are both free to express our views. So far the two parties have never been at loggerheads.”

But he concedes, “You do have individuals within the parties that like the idea of the union and others who don’t. But we just have to work with that.”

Trotman agrees that the two parties are free to express their own views and that from time to time views on a particular issue would diverge. But he says the relationship is sound and points to the parliamentary partnership between the WPA’s representative, Sheila Holder and GAP’s Shirley Melville.

Commenting on whether the WPA has helped GAP in the hinterland and on the coastland, Hardy believes that because his party is new on the scene it probably has.

But he says he is more concerned that his party helps the WPA, which he says has been around for some 25 years.

Hardy admits that it goes through the difficulties that any relationship goes through but “we have to deal with that.”

He says whether the two parties go into the next elections as a union, will be determined when the leadership meets and comes to a decision.