“Smaller financial centres can suffer higher inequality effects, too. In Jersey, for instance labour-market policies have placed severe downwards pressure on wages, yet average house prices are over three times as high as those in the UK and growing…”

— The Finance Curse

Tell me lies

As new residents, mainly English, are arriving on British Airways flights in business class, Bermudians are flying economy on the outbound flights to Britain as fast as they can. The Narrative Research poll highlighted in The Royal Gazette last week has proved to be very timely and alarming, as it shows that a new wave of emigration of Bermudians and departure of residents who may be on work permits may be at hand.

Fleetwood Mac has a song titled Little Lies. Before the Progressive Labour Party took over government after a stint in opposition, my former colleagues and I would routinely talk and debate on the floor of the House of Assembly about the exodus of Bermudians to Britain.

After the 2017 election, though, the elected Members were forbidden by David Burt to publicly discuss the issue of emigration, despite the trend continuing. What was not surprising, at least anecdotally at that time, was that a large percentage of the departees appeared to be younger, Black Bermudians — many of whom were hoisting the white flag because they could no longer afford to live here owing to the ruinous cost of living. Although I would concede that growing numbers of Black and White Bermudians within our eroding middle class are also looking for an out, which the poll may confirm.

The reason? I assumed that the Premier did not wish for that messy detail, which was affecting his government’s political base, to get in the way of a misleading, feel-good story about how great the economy was for most of the voters who placed their faith in us.

Broken promises

In my mind, this trend is intensifying because of our failure as a PLP government to put in place the types of redistributive policies called for in the 2017 election platform. Some of which I fought hard to have inserted, such as a living wage, healthcare restructuring where more than 5,000 Black Bermudians are without health insurance, and an equitable tax system that would ensure that those who live and work on the international business oasis carry a greater share of the tax burden — not only in terms of the companies themselves, but also those highly paid executives. This is a sector where even junior executives in their twenties can easily earn $300,000 per annum before bonuses and benefits. Seven years later, hard-pressed Bermudians are still waiting for the promised relief.

Second, because the growth of international business is such a large percentage of this economy — 60 per cent of gross domestic product at a minimum, with roughly 80 per cent of spending on island being derived from that sector — it continues to preclude our ability to diversify this economy. Its role in driving up income and wealth inequality — which, of course, in turn increases not only the cost of living but also the cost of doing business on island — has hollowed out the rest of this economy and prevented our ability to diversify this economy. It is why we have been manifestly unable to establish the types of jobs that would provide decent wages and benefits for a significant number of predominantly Black Bermudians who lack college degrees, including now in a sector that could have filled part of that role in hospitality.

As researchers Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef show in The Finance Curse, “international business/financial sector growth can be a powerful driver of inequality and outright poverty, too. It is also a key driver of this inequality”. The one industry that had the potential to provide some of those jobs in the hospitality sector, as it once did for our parents and grandparents, is now realistically not an option because of the actions of this government and union leaders.

As the cost of goods such as housing and services increases, those at the bottom of income distribution — the Black working poor, some of whom were present at the Fairmont Southampton during the developer’s giveaway of furniture, televisions, etc — catch hell. All of this in a Bermuda where GDP per capita is at $112,000, the fourth highest in the world. Look at our homelessness where 90 per cent of the affected are Black men, according to the recently published Chief Medical Officer’s report — the last one of Ayo Oyinloye’s tenure. Look at the food lines up and down the country, where again routinely those in the queues are routinely 90 per cent Black. Think about this and Black Bermudians comprising 56 per cent of today’s resident population.

Amid plenty, poverty is increasing.

We see the same in Ireland, another so-called successful offshore financial services centre where scores of low to middle-income citizens are leaving in droves because they, too, can no longer afford to live in their homeland despite a high GDP per capita. Sound familiar? Housing there is a big issue, too.

That recent photograph taken at the Fairmont Southampton said it all: an overwhelmingly Black Bermudian crowd there to snap up furniture, televisions and other assorted goods. And they seem to have been those most inclined over this period to make the decision to pull up roots and emigrate to Britain. They are far from alone.

In conclusion

The cruel irony is that the Government’s own policy objectives in terms of retaining and growing the population by more than 8,000 new residents – the latter I will call the Sir Henry Tucker/Michael Fahy plan — has only undermined those policy goals.

Even the goal of Bermudians returning to the island from Britain and elsewhere is beyond reach. Do you realise that it is far more expensive to live in Bermuda than London, and Britain more broadly? The same would apply to most other places around the world.

Where would they find employment, especially those with a high school degree at best? In the hotel industry? (Reference my earlier comments.) It’s laughable. But the joke is on us. Maybe they will find work in one of the shiny new industries that finally have been established that can produce a living wage and decent middle-income rate of pay, which allows one to live comfortably and raise a family in affordable accommodation. Not lavish, but comfortable with accessible healthcare.

Is that too much to ask in a country with the fourth highest GDP in the world? It seems so.

Not only is Bermuda long overdue for a reset of its constitutional and political framework after nearly six decades, but it is also clear that its economic model is broken and no longer sustainable, except for those on the oasis of international business, in upper levels of the Civil Service and, yes, those who have won the financial lottery and now find themselves in David Burt’s Cabinet.

For all of them, the status quo is just fine. Maybe that’s why most of the elected Members who do not possess the ethos and ideological commitment of a Freddie Wade, Walter Roberts or Dame Lois Browne-Evans would do anything possible to get in Cabinet these days. The One Bermuda Alliance as well if given half the chance.

This is what keeping up with the IB Joneses has done to the so-called Black Bermudian political and financial elites. That is the Bermuda we now live in.

• 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