October 30, 2012Dear Sir,There is a certain disconnect or dissonance in the difference between what people in Government say about the state of Bermuda today, and the reality of ordinary people’s perception of what they see around them. When a Government person gets up on their hind legs and defends their party’s performance, declaiming how they have improved Bermuda in various ways, it clatters against the perception of many if not most ordinary people that the economy is in a mess, jobs are being lost left, right and centre, and tourism is slatting around in the doldrums, while the permanence of international business in Bermuda is inherently conditional, and future prospects are less than promising.People don’t trust Pollyanna politicking, because it just doesn’t make sense. It seems dishonest because it is at odds with the daily reality that ordinary people experience. The politicians in power try to persuade us that everything’s hunky-dory, or at least heading that way — and we’re not buying it when we see with our own eyes that things are, frankly, more like a sinking dory than the hunky kind.And, naturally, the Government claims credit for any achievements but it blames “global recession” or “hard times” or some other spurious factors outside their control for failures or shortcomings. (By that logic, however, it can’t claim to have had anything to do with the good times in past years when the Bermuda economy was rockin’ and rollin’. Government can’t pick and choose what they’re responsible for, in the broad sense of that word: either they are a responsible institution, or they are not. Leadership in government is as much about taking appropriate action, and responsibility, in the face of things they can’t control as it is about taking justified credit for things they can control.)The central question people really ask themselves is, what is the Government of the day doing to resolve or at least tackle the problems that need solving to make our community better? And how likely is the opposition to do any better? In other words, it comes down to what we think one party or the other can do in government, not what they say. At the ballot box in the forthcoming election that question will boil down to whether you trust your own eyes and mind and experience, on the one hand, or, on the other, what the candidates would like you to believe — and the credibility gap between the two. In other words, what makes sense to you, and what’s just plain nonsense.GRAHAM FAIELLALondon, UK