While I was not in attendance at the Progressive Labour Party’s annual banquet in November 2023 – which also doubled as the 60th Anniversary Gala of the PLP – I did hear about aspects of the night. Of course, most of what I heard centred around the keynote speaker, Tennessee state representative Justin Jones. As interesting as his speech may have been, it was the welcoming address by the PLP’s most recent and exciting candidate, Mischa Fubler, which caught my attention. I subsequently reached out to Mr Fubler for a copy of his speech, which he gratefully provided to me.

Without recreating his speech, the key aspects of it that caught my attention were these:

1, He noted that the PLP started off as the Bermuda Labour Party on Thursday, February 14, only to adopt the more familiar name of the Progressive Labour Party a week later, and muses on why the name change and the significance of adding “Progressive” to the party’s name

2, He then challenged the audience — and, by extension, all party members — to reflect on what it means to be progressive and what it means to be pro-labour, today and all of the days after that

I cannot speak to the degree that those in attendance, or party members subsequent, have really reflected on these points since; however, I am happy to take up the challenge here.

Unfortunately, there is, to my knowledge, no singular official history of the PLP, and of those who were best-placed to write it, I suspect most have sadly passed. Nonetheless, they did leave us some key works we can consult, such as Ira Philip’s monumental The History of the Bermuda Industrial Union or Walton Brown’s magnificent Bermuda & the Struggle for Reform. We are also fortunate to have Quito Swan’s marvellous Black Power in Bermuda – The Struggle for Decolonisation. All three of these books provide valuable insights into the birth of the PLP.

While the PLP is fond of describing itself as Bermuda’s first political party, it was, in fact, only Bermuda’s first official political party in Parliament — there were actually two formal political parties that predate the formation of the PLP itself, albeit only by a matter of months.

Bermuda’s first political party — and arguably the most radical — was the Bermuda United Worker’s Party, formed in September 1962. It failed to reach critical mass in terms of support and membership, and largely faded into oblivion not long after its formation.

Another party formed, I understand in early 1963, with the name of Bermuda Labour Party, although it was not well known, to the point that the founders of what became the PLP did not even know it existed at the time that they launched with the same name in February 1963. It was the existence of this other Bermuda Labour Party, formed shortly before the one that became the PLP, which explains the subsequent name change to the more familiar Progressive Labour Party.

One may well wonder why they chose to add “Progressive” to the name, however. To me, this is straightforward: it was a symbolic merging in a single party of the two main movements that had been in opposition to the White supremacist oligarchic status quo – the labour movement and the Progressive Group, which was most famous for the 1959 Theatre Boycott.

It is worth noting that 1959 was a watershed period for Bermuda, the events of that year resulting largely in the political reforms that led directly to the formation of, first, the PLP, and second, in reaction to this development, the creation of the United Bermuda Party in 1963.

The most famous of these events was the Theatre Boycott of June 1959, which led to the formal desegregation of theatres, and began the process of desegregation that continued through to the early 1970s. An equally relevant event occurred in September 1959, with the dock strike by the longshoremen’s division of the Bermuda Industrial Union under the leadership of Joe Mills. To quote the late Eva Hodgson, this strike “…shook the very foundation of the entire White establishment’s racist anti-working-class structure”.

Modern Bermuda was essentially born as a result of these two events, and with their successes the prestige of the Progressive Group and the labour movement gave the PLP an obvious name and focus. At the same time, the influence of the British Labour Party provided an additional ingredient, if not the spark, for the push for a labour party in the Bermuda context.

Beyond explaining why the PLP took on the name “Progressive Labour” in place of its initial name, this origin also goes some way to informing Mr Fubler’s subsequent challenge to the members, in terms of understanding what the founders of the PLP may have understood by what it means to be “progressive” and what it means to be “labour”. It is also important to understand what the late Ralph Miliband described as labourism and its commitment to parliamentarianism.

In subsequent articles, I will look to explore the question of what it means to be “progressive” and “labour”, drawing on the context of the time to understand what abstract meaning can be drawn to help inform what they should mean for their application both today “…and all of the days after that”.

• Jonathan Starling is a socialist writer with an MSc in Ecological Economics from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in Urban and Regional Planning from Heriot-Watt University