December 19, 2008

WHEN John Swan was Premier - and even before he became his unofficial hatchet man and Number One Apologist - I thought Mike Winfield was a pretty unbearable politician.

He was always out there pushing for everyone to stop second-guessing or questioning the then Premier. Winfield struck me then as a guy who figured the road to political success was to pander to the Premier and his inner-circle, telling them everything they wanted to hear ... and telling everyone else to shut the hell up.

For years, he was especially vocal in his belief that Bermuda had No Other God Than Swan or some such nonsense and that the United Bermuda Party was somehow divinely ordained to lead the island.

He was among the most consistent and nastier critics of the Progressive Labour Party and did as much as anyone to entrench the racial and cultural divide in this island along political lines.

Winfield abruptly resigned from the Senate when there was some scatter action about his plans to put an international business centre at the site of the old Bermudiana Hotel (the ACE and XL Buildings went up there instead).

For many years we heard nothing from him, which was just fine by me.

Then he suddenly reappeared and signed his name to the critically flawed Bermuda Independence Commission report.

And more recently, he's become a very vocal advocate of "The Big Conversation", which deals in the same type of banal oversimplifications of complex problems as the Independence report (and, yes, I have sat through some of the "Big Conversation" meetings so I have first-hand knowledge of its "Drink the Kool-Aid and don't argue back" methods).

Based on the two pages your newspaper recently devoted to his keynote speech to the wrap-up meeting of the race relations initiative, he is pretty much reversing every position the old Mike Winfield once defended.

The UBP, rather than being the solution to all of Bermuda's problems, is now the cause of many of them along with the Progressive Labour Party because the two-party system has turned Bermudian politics into a kind of gang warfare (something many of us have been saying for years but which we were told to shut up about when Winfield was the UBP's "Propaganda Minister"). There is more to a kernel of truth to what Winfield said about the corrosive impact of party politics on Bermuda.

But most of the rest of the politically correct - and logically and factually incorrect - bombast he came out with painted an oversimplified and historically and culturally suspect picture of race relations in Bermuda. And I noticed when he was busy apportioning blame for the current, polarised state of our society, he carefully avoided including himself among those miscreants who have contributed to the divisions in this little community.

He now seems to be just as insufferable in defence of "The Big Conversation" as he once was in opposing anybody who held a contrary point of view to his prior to his racial "epiphany". And clearly he's done a 180 on many other issues, as well.

When someone you once thought was wrong about so many things goes over to the other side, there are only two possible ways to interpret his actions.

One is to bear in mind the Ebenezer Scrooge example. Once the person sees the light, we forgive them and admire their willingness to change and admit error. We all remember that no one kept Christmas in their heart better than the reformed Scrooge.

The other viewpoint is that they've changed positions for reasons of sheer opportunism; that you can't trust their sincerity and can't even trust them to not flip back the other way again if and when it becomes advantageous.

It would be nice to believe Mr. Winfield is sincere in wanting to help undo some of the damage he is actually responsible for creating.

But I think I'm still in the second camp.

SCEPTIC

City of Hamilton