Dear Sir,

In her letter in your March 31 edition, LeYoni Junos asks for my thoughts on comments apparently made in 2001 by a former Governor of Bermuda, Sir Peter Ramsbotham, in relation to the Commonwealth Residential Vote — a measure first enacted in 1963, which allowed Commonwealth citizens who had been resident in Bermuda for three years to vote in Bermuda’s elections and which was abolished in 1979 by foreign secretary Lord Carrington after the United Bermuda Party and the opposition Progressive Labour Party had been unable to reach a political agreement in relation to its phasing out, as part of continuing Warwick Camp Constitutional Conference negotiations; Lord Carrington deciding that, henceforth, Commonwealth citizens would be able to vote in Bermuda only if they were 21 and had Bermudian status or if they had been registered to vote in Bermuda on May 1, 1976.

Sir Peter’s comment that “Young white people, who had been in Bermuda for more than three years, had the vote at the elections just because they were Commonwealth and white” is plainly untrue, since blacks — or persons of other racial groups — from Commonwealth countries were also able to avail themselves of the same provision; and there were, I am sure, quite a few black West Indians in Bermuda who did so. As for Sir Peter’s rather lurid comment that “this [the Commonwealth Residential Vote] had deprived the black opposition party of ever really getting enough votes to get power. For 30 years, you had a one-party dictatorship there”: it was certainly wrong of Sir Peter to describe Bermuda as a one-party dictatorship, or any other kind of dictatorship, for that matter.

Sir Peter was obviously expressing himself in rather exaggerated terms, and irresponsibly — he had, I believe, by that time been retired from the diplomatic service for many years and would have been rather elderly. It might also be added that Sir Peter was in no real sense an expert on Bermuda, save perhaps for those few years when he was actually governor (1977-1980); and governors of Bermuda were, by that stage, largely figureheads rather than being intimately involved in general policymaking or everyday governance.

Sir Peter was clearly being rather simplistic in suggesting that the Commonwealth Residential Vote had been the sole reason for the PLP’s failure to win any general elections before 1998. There were, no doubt, many reasons for the PLP’s inability to persuade the electorate to give it power in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and most of the 1990s, and I am sure that the PLP’s own policies and rhetoric had a lot to do with it. As for the Commonwealth Residential Vote, it was enacted before I was born and was abolished while I was still a child, so I do not personally accept either credit or discredit for it.

Ms Junos somewhat misrepresents my Public Access to Information request to the Ministry of Home Affairs. To reiterate, I had asked what documentary evidence or other factual evidence or information had formed the basis of the minister’s statement that he “fully accepts” (sic) that in the 1960s and 1970s, the “Government manipulated immigration law to maximise votes” (sic).

Seemingly, from the ministry’s reply, no such evidence or information had formed the basis of Senator Michael Fahy’s statement.

It should be noted that Ms Junos is also widening the scope of the matter, to bring in parliamentary election legislation and other matters that were not part of my initial query.

Politics are of course apt to be a sometimes grubby affair, in all ages, and I have no doubt at all that in the 1960s, the Government did seek, legislatively, to limit the electoral success of the opposition PLP, which was in those days rather left-wing. However, I have never seen any evidence that the Government “manipulated immigration law to maximise votes” — as stated by Senator Fahy, in his capacity as minister with responsibility for immigration matters in the present administration.

Bermuda’s economy has always needed personnel from beyond Bermuda’s shores to function effectively, and to see that as primarily a racial or political matter is to carry cynicism to the point of naivety, if not paranoia. The Government was not importing white people as voting cattle, but was responding to the needs of the economy.

No doubt there was a preponderance of white expats rather than of black expats in the 1960s and 1970s, but it should be borne in mind that in the 1960s and 1970s, Bermuda’s economy was booming with hotels and international business, both of which needed people with particular experience and expertise that were not always, or even often, to be found from among the Bermudian population, and which could most conveniently be found in highly developed rich-world countries — and bear in mind, also, that those hotels and international companies were, in most cases, foreign-owned. Work-permits were not, I am pretty sure, handed out on the basis of race.

Ms Junos makes various references to my late father, Reginald Walter Evans, and lest readers form from them a rather misled impression of his circumstances, I would mention that he was brought to Bermuda from England at age 3, in 1919. His own father had served in the British Army garrison in Bermuda some years before and after his death in the First World War, his widow brought her young children to Bermuda.

Dad had therefore been a Bermudian for decades before the elections of 1958 and 1963, which Ms Junos discusses. Her comments may also seem to imply that Dad was some sort of idle plutocrat, but in reality he was a self-made man and an entrepreneur in several fields in Bermuda — he had what is nowadays sometimes called a “portfolio career”.

He, like Ms Junos’s parents, was “working” at the time of both the 1958 and 1963 elections. Indeed, he was still serving the public at his small real estate business, Gilmour & Evans Ltd on Reid Street, at the time of his death in 1987.

JONATHAN LAND EVANS