Today’s world of tourism is vastly different from the tourism of three decades ago. At the apex of our tourism industry, we reverted to the construction of larger hotels. The Fairmont Southampton epitomises that period and remains a successful institution and possibly Bermuda’s premier all-inclusive resort.

That phenomenon may never be repeated; there have been several non-starters over the years, then flops such as Club Med, but the market to build has not been supported by the momentum of the tourist.

One huge change factor in the tourist industry worldwide has been the movement towards cruise ships, which shifted from being a means of transport to that of floating resorts carrying passengers to multiple destinations.

It took Bermuda a while to realise the tide had changed, as we bemoaned the success of the tourism ministry and its philosophy to combat the fall in tourist numbers.

Nothing could reverse the worldwide trend and, certainly, we were unprepared for a natural step in the evolutionary development of the cruise industry. Ships got bigger, in fact too big for both of our ports. We heard the ministers’ untenable attempt to attract smaller cruise ships, but that market was too small and it, too, evolved and was competing with more exotic destinations in remote places around the world.

Dockyard brought Bermuda back on the cruise ship map and perhaps was the salvation of tourism as a struggling industry. While we pontificate over the ups and downs of tourism, the fundamental factor belying Bermuda was that its ports, essentially built in the 19th century, became inadequate for the shipping industry of the late 20th century.

While the ministry was thinking and spending on promotional advertisements and hiring booking agents, the reality was that money would have been better spent on digging channels and upgrading our port status and capacity.

This same myopia faces our general society. Bermuda is entirely dependent on imports; everything consumed comes through our ports. Similar and perhaps more drastically, since the adoption of container cargo, ships have been getting larger and are too large and incapable of servicing our island through our ports. Just as we initially lost the cruise visitor, we are now locked outside of the general global trade.

Both Hamilton Harbour and the Town of St George, including Marginal Wharf, as commercial port locations peg Bermuda to the 19th century.

This is not a political point, it is a structural reality. The political point would be on choosing to remain as an inadequate port location.

To make the Town of St George a relevant commercial port would mean completely removing an island to widen Town Cut, and a need for channel reconstruction that will alter the face of the Olde Towne and still end up with totally inadequate docking facilities.

Bermuda needs to diversify its economy and offer its citizens more options to do business — not just in Bermuda, but throughout the world. The ports are key and instrumental in the possibilities of what those options are. If we are just a local port, we are limited by our infrastructure to our existing level of business. Again, this is not a political point, it is structural. It becomes a political point when policies limit what the country’s options would be.

Naturally for some persons, keeping things just as they are may guarantee some status quo. However, if the idea is about diversification, inclusion and increasing the scope of Bermuda’s commerce and gross domestic product, there is only one solution: bring our ports up to the 21st century.

It would be entirely political not to do so. The consequences that we are living with have already been quantitatively demonstrated with the tourism experience.

We face a logical question that is very simple. Do we want to remain outside of global trade by keeping a quaint 19th-century local port? Or do we want to enter the existing world of trade as a functioning participant?

These are structural questions; the politics only follows the answer.