Oswald Gaskell Harding OJ, CD, KC (born 3 November 1935) is a Jamaican former Labour Party politician, and the longest-serving senator in the nation's history.
[2][3][4][5] In the 1976 general election, Harding ran as the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) candidate for the Saint Andrew East Rural seat in the Jamaican House of Representatives.
He held the position until 1984, when he became Leader of Government Business in the Senate, and was made a Minister without portfolio in the Foreign Affairs Ministry.
In the 1993 general election, he attempted to unseat incumbent representative John A. Junor, a PNP member occupying the Manchester Central seat.
[5] In October 2000, Harding urged the government to ratify the United Nations Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which aims at abolishing the death penalty.
Drawing on the writings of John Stuart Mill and the findings of the 1957 Wolfenden report, Harding indicated where he thought that law and morality should intersect by saying "It is not the function of the law to intervene in the private lives of citizens or seek to enforce any particular pattern of behaviour further than to preserve public order and decency and to protect the citizen from what is offensive or injurious and to provide safeguards against exploitation and corruption of others".
In the same speech, Harding stressed that while it was acceptable to criticise American foreign policy because it affects the rest of the word, letting that criticism lead to anti-Americanism would be counterproductive.