The Progressive Labour Party was not elected to maintain the status quo, but to bring about the systemic changes necessary to achieve a more equitable Bermuda characterised by economic and racial equity and equality.

The recent release of the Narrative Research Bermuda poll provides us political junkies with a well-needed fix this week. I pose the following question:

A year out from the 2020 General Election, did any poll confirm that more than 30 per cent of those who had voted in 2017 would refuse to return to the polls three short years later?

Yet that is precisely what occurred. So I urge caution with respect to the recent voter-intention poll. That figure of more than 10,000 voters who disappeared from the polls in 2020 represents the biggest fall in voter participation in Bermuda’s modern political history in successive general elections. The PLP, which lost more than 4,500 voters during that period, will certainly see an additional haemorrhaging of voter support this time. But I seriously doubt that any measurable number of those voters would come out and vote for the One Bermuda Alliance. Why vote for more of the same?

I believe things will be more fluid in 2024 than what this poll indicates at present. I will say, though, that along with an absolutely ruinous cost of living that is worsening owing to another modest boom in the international business sector, which is unlikely to abate anytime soon, it is the broken electoral promises, most stretching back to 2017, along with the fracturing of the party itself at the parliamentary level, that has fuelled growing discontent.

Burt’s folly

The failure to honour electoral promises is hardly ever forgiven, especially those made to the Black working poor, which forms at least 40 per cent of the party’s base — not to mention the impact of the above upon an eroding Bermudian middle class. And the list of those broken promises are damnable: healthcare restructuring, education reform, the living wage, root-and-branch tax reform, cost-of-living initiatives. I repeat these were all progressive public-policy initiatives promised in 2017 nearly seven years ago.

David Burt, besides his proclivity to gaslight all and sundry should look no farther than the above as the reason that he is now the most despised politician in recent history —surpassing even Michael Fahy. With the major blow suffered by the seeming collapse of the Fairmont Southampton deal in which he invested so much political capital, the animus towards him will only grow.

He impersonated a progressive on the election stump in 2017 and then ran as fast as he could as soon as the election was over, right into the hands of the oligarchs of international business and the wealthy developer class. He has always been more of a natural fit anyway for the UBP/OBA than the PLP by way of his background. More and more people are waking up to that. He seems more consumed with climbing the social and economic ladder, using his political power to do so, than fighting for the voters who placed their faith in him.

Hell for the Black working poor

An expansion of international business represents real hell for the Black working poor, which the PLP through a failure to honour its supposed convictions is manifestly failing to come to grips with. Precisely because neither party has acknowledged that it has been the extraordinary growth of international business — the only game in town — that is not only our blessing but also our curse. For thousands of people and counting. This will continue to roil our politics the larger the sector becomes.

It is hardly arguable that it is international business itself and its growth post-2000 that has massively driven up the cost of living in Bermuda and the cost of doing business — to the extent that it has been virtually impossible to diversify this economy.

In terms of the PLP’s political prospects once you reach the political summit, political gravity mandates there is only one direction left — and that is down. The mandate of heaven in this regard is never kind. The only question is, how many seats will they lose? The usual suspects, as I indicated some months back, are those constituencies located on the southern spine of the country where most of the more affluent White population reside.

‘I have a Black friend’

The racial demographics reflected in the poll are no surprise. Notwithstanding, the Black faces that represented the United Bermuda Party then and the OBA now, those parties historically have been where the White minority has been dominant. It was a successful model up until 1998 because it consistently attracted between 15 per cent and 25 per cent of the Black vote. In the Senate and the House for close to 60 years, that model has not changed, with the PLP getting 2 per cent to 4 per cent at best of the White vote over the same period.

The OBA will not benefit electorally to the degree it may think. I still see the Opposition, as indicated in a previous op-ed, gaining only three, maybe four, seats at best. While I see the PLP losing more than four seats, those additional losses will not go to the OBA.

First of all, the OBA’s candidates — at least the ones unveiled to date — are dismal and largely unknown. Second, they are still playing by an old electoral playbook. The problem is that playbook long lost its effectiveness as a viable political strategy, as that sub-group of the Black middle class that I referenced above, abandoned the UBP/OBA decades ago and went virtually all-in with the PLP.

The hollowing-out of our democracy

The real threat and chief concern should be the growing power of international business/financial services in the country to the extent that it is hollowing-out our democracy by way of its inordinate power. The industry leaders in that sector are now the new foreign-born oligarchs. The only difference between this set of oligarchs and those from the 1960s is that the incumbents are not from around here. This is what has driven both parties into the same political church to some degree — better still the same pew, where they practically sit one on top of the other.

When growing numbers of Bermudians complain about the lack of an opposition party, they may not fully understand this, but for many this is what they are really identifying. The advent of the global minimum tax, if it is implemented in 2025, may free us to some extent from this paradigm and diminish the power of these new oligarchs — thus allowing reassertion in our politics and, more importantly, our democracy. Global companies no longer would be able to threaten to leave or hold our economy hostage in order to get their way at the expense of the common good. Not when the next jurisdiction just over the horizon has the same tax regime as any other for the most part.

Which brings me to my next and final point: I disagree with the notion that the political options for Bermudians are between Tweedledum and Tweedledee — like we have now and which the poll suggests.

I believe that a dynamic new movement and political force can penetrate the existing two-party status quo and restore a sense of optimism and renewal in ways that were not achievable over the preceding decades.

While the OBA may get only three to four seats more, I do believe there will be more seats for the taking at the next election because a significant political realignment is overdue. The bottom line is that with local and global changes taking place, the present crop of those I call the Black political elite on either side of the aisle is not up to the challenges presented by these changes. Can anyone really identify the difference between a Jarion Richardson and a David Burt politically? I can’t.

I see the emergence of a party from the progressive Left, and not one positioned to the political Right. After all, there are already two parties dominating that part of the political landscape, thanks to Mr Burt. Their acronyms: OBA and, regrettably, PLP.

The great political and constitutional realignment after nearly 60 years is at hand.

• 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