There has been a good deal of debate about the future of the United Bermuda Party since it suffered its third successive election defeat last month.

That's hardly surprising, since the UBP ended up with the same number of seats it won in 2003 – 14 – and saw its share of the popular vote slip by around one percent to 47.2 percent.

It is true that that many Opposition parties would be happy with that sort of result, especially given the parlous state that the UBP was in just nine months or so earlier, when MP Jamahl Simmons and party chairwoman Gwyneth Rawlins accused its leadership of racism and walked out of the party.

But the final result was still not good enough for a party that expected to pick up more seats and narrow the PLP's margin of the popular vote, if not actually win the election.

So the UBP certainly needs to reflect on its future. The question now is whether it needs to tweak its structure and philosophy, conduct a wholesale revamp, or go as far as dissolving and start again from scratch.

Party chairman Shawn Crockwell said recently that the last option was off the table, with the UBP's MPs apparently determined not to tear down the party's structure.

The good news for the UBP is that it has a certain amount of time to select a new leader and set a new course before Parliament resumes in February.

For 30 years, the UBP's electoral success required that it added the vast majority of white voters supporting it with enough black, primarily middle class, swing voters, to put it over the top.

It attracted that combination by emphasising its skills at management along with a philosophy of racial integration in which people of all races would benefit from a growing and stable economy along with what might broadly be called capitalism with a social conscience.

But the reality is that the white vote has been steadily shrinking for the last few decades, due to a declining birth rate and, to a lesser extent, emigration.

At the same time, the PLP's move to the centre ground of politics, begun by the late Frederick Wade and later Dame Jennifer Smith and Alex Scott, attracted middle class and professional blacks to the party, both as voters and as candidates.

That move too, was sparked by frustration at the slow rate of economic empowerment in the black community, which the UBP failed to address despite the efforts of people like Jerome Dill in setting up the Commission for Unity and Racial Equality.

In the December election, the PLP also effectively exploited the notion that the UBP remained the "puppet", to use one of its most unpleasant advertisements, of the supposed Front Street establishment.

Never mind that "Front Street" as a political force, let alone an economic one, is pretty much moribund; the UBP failed to effectively counter the idea.

And since the election, some PLP thinkers have also argued that the UBP is by definition racist because it attracts near 100 percent white support. The argument goes, in effect, that most black voters will stop seeing the UBP as a white party when whites start to join or suport the PLP in significant numbers.

That leaves open the question of whether whites have any philosophical incentive to join the PLP apart from the purely opportunistic, but, as former PLP MP Renee Webb pointed out recently, in a political environment where race is the overriding issue, a party led by whites – regardless of whether that it is the reality or the perception – cannot expect to win a general election in which whites make up less than a third of the electorate.

These present hard questions for a party that has always stressed that it is colour-blind and believes devoutly in integration. But they are questions it must answer if it does not wish to be a permanent opposition.

Tomorrow: The UBP's options