This message is to Lieutenant-Colonel David Burch, Wayne Caines, David Burt and those who spout the shopworn cliché “The Combined Opposition” — a holdover from the eras of Ewart Brown and Paula Cox. Just to let them know that the so called Combined Opposition these days comprises Black politicians in the Progressive Labour Party —particularly its leadership class — and, of course, those in the One Bermuda Alliance. That is why it is hard to discern any substantive difference between the two. Who are they opposing by their public policy choices but the Black working poor and a shrinking middle-income group?

As written previously, both parties are not only in the same less than sanctified church but in the same pew — in fact, they are sitting on top of each other. This represents a crisis among Black political and financial elites, as the certainty of the four-decade-long neoliberal era fractures. We now live in a Bermuda where for well over two decades income and wealth inequality have exploded neatly, tracking through most of that period under a PLP government. This has resulted in:

• Lack of health insurance: 5,000 Black Bermudians have been without it since 2019

• The living wage: the Government has facilitated and been complicit in the retention of a Bermuda business model that uses low-cost, low to-median skilled foreign labour in hospitality and increasingly in construction, landscaping and other sectors to drive down wages to virtually poverty levels, which has made it virtually impossible for the Black working poor to find jobs that they can afford to live on in certain occupational categories — in hospitality especially

• Migration to Britain: the Government’s default answer to the above

• A ruinous cost of living that shows no sign of abating: a $20.55 head of cauliflower being the most recent Exhibit A on social media

• A government roughly $3 billion in debt — and growing

• The world continuing to view offshore tax havens such as Bermuda with growing hostility amid the most profound geopolitical changes seen in decades, just like in the 1960s

When our Black political and financial elites and our government and Opposition are hostage to the types of regulatory capture found in international business, assorted oligarchs and the billionaire class, it is not difficult to understand why the above is in fact our reality.

While income and wealth inequality have been driven chiefly by the explosive, unfettered growth of international business and financial services in Bermuda, what we must acknowledge — as did a friend and high-level executive who works in international business — is that what has caused the unrelenting rise in our cost of living, present imported inflation excepted, and moreover in the cost of doing business in Bermuda has been the phenomenal growth of international business over the past quarter-century. Certainly, the only real growth in this economy has come from that sector during the life of the PLP government. Let’s just call it the law of diminishing returns.

The biggest losers? Black Bermudians in general. That is why a class divide is growing in the Black community with an expanding minority making significant salaries and benefits in the international business/financial services sectors and upper-level Civil Service, with most of them being PLP and actively dominating the party and government, unlike in previous decades. All of this comes amid the most destructive impacts from the above being visited upon a fairly large and growing percentage of their own Black voting base.

It is problematic when it becomes the only real engine of economic growth in Bermuda. Neither party is acknowledging that. Only redistributive public policies can address the societal harm that this overreliance on international business has brought in its wake — the absence of which is not an accident, but a state of play through intent.

Having said all that, the laws of political gravity dictate that what goes up must come down. I predict that the PLP will lose somewhere between six and nine seats at the next General Election.

However, I have to break this to Scott Pearman, Jarion Richardson, Vic Ball, Susan Jackson, Craig Cannonier and Cole Simons: if the One Bermuda Alliance hopes to pick up two or three those seats from Smith’s and Southampton, they should think themselves lucky. From where I sit, that is not in the clouds.

However, that still leaves six seats that will likely go to either a new party that must come from the more progressive Left, independents or a combination of the two. The two main parties are so far to the Centre Right on so many issues that the only opportunity for change has to come with the swinging of the political pendulum in the opposite direction.

After 60 years, I believe that the great reset of our political and constitutional framework is at hand. It was first established in the mid to late-1960s and it produced this existing constitutional and political framework. It also embedded White privilege throughout our system and afforded its architects — the old Bermuda oligarchy led by Sir Henry Tucker — another three decades of electoral dominance. But it is also one in which the PLP, in the absence of the systemic and thus structural changes necessary to dismantle it since 1998, has become complicit in maintaining it. Which explains somewhat the dead end at which both parties have arrived.

This is the central paradox facing Bermuda.

• Rolfe Commissiong was the Progressive Labour Party MP for Pembroke South East (Constituency 21) between December 2012 and August 2020, and the former chairman of the joint select committee considering the establishment of a living wage