David Burt recently pledged to address the cost of living in Bermuda. Do I need to remind you that this is the same David Burt who said he would address social and economic justice initiatives that were embedded in the Progressive Labour Party’s 2017 election platform.

In the seven long years since, what has he addressed, let alone accomplished? Not the cost-of-living initiative. Not the living wage. Not health insurance reform. Not a single thing that permanently improves the lives of ordinary Bermudians. That’s most of us.

In fact, the cost-of-living committee under Anthony Richardson was almost dead not too long after that General Election.

It also failed under Derrick Burgess, the chair who succeeded Mr Richardson a few years later. To be fair, Mr Burgess made a weak-hearted attempt centred on customs duty. Even that weak attempt at action yielded only a pittance to hard-pressed households.

Why these failures? Largely because Mr Burt is committed to preserving the status quo of wealthy corporations and individuals. His desire is to become one of them. That desire is far stronger than the values around social and economic justice of the same Progressive Labour Party that he once scorned before throwing in his lot.

Even if Mr Burt is saying, again, that he is committed now to these public policies — as he did so long ago with an election in the air — we need to call him out.

Don’t be fooled again, Bermuda!

We should hammer him for not listening to the people in the party who consistently were advocating after that 2017 election to address those issues as a matter of urgency — only to have those pleas fall on deaf ears of the likes of Mr Burt, Wayne Caines and their sycophants.

Let’s call it the dance of the young wannabes.

Mr Burt deserves no credit. Why were those people who were most affected by these failures, those at the bottom of income distribution in Bermuda, not a priority over seven long years? Those are the very people comprising the PLP’s own base. By all accounts, Bermuda has had the highest and most ruinous cost of living in the world throughout this period. Mr Burt needs to be indicted for these failures, not praised.

Instead, MPs were admonished not to talk publicly about the exodus of hundreds of Bermudians to Britain — 5,000 and counting over the past 14 years. The exodus continues, most from the ranks of the Black working poor and, increasingly, retirees. All of this is largely owing to the same public policy failures that Mr “Status Quo” Burt now must own.

As to tackling the root cause of violence and gang formation, alluded by him in his national address, its cause is no secret. All of which is now ring-fenced around Bermuda’s Black low-income communities and households.

In 2017, instead of addressing the root cause, which was and remains socioeconomic, and its intersection with race in Bermuda, what did we get despite my protestations? We had a newly minted national security minister, Wayne Caines, Mr Burt’s childhood playmate, putting on a lavish prayer vigil at the national stadium with Mr Caines literally playing the role of a church minister. You can’t make this up.

If you ask me, symbolically that would sum up the David Burt era.

Respectability politics: Exhibit A

The term respectability politics, as it relates to politicians in Bermuda, is not referring to your politician being nice, polite, modest, courteous or even virtuous. No! Instead, it refers to a politician who indulges in a form of politics where one invariably defers to the status quo ... politically and economically. If you had read my last op-ed, globally the 2024 election cycle, with few exceptions, has not been kind to status quo parties and governments. I believe the result at the next election in Bermuda will not buck that trend for all parties — that means you too, Free Democratic Movement.

A perfect example of this is what Mr Burt did in relation to the hospitality industry and with regard to his former employer, the restaurant tycoon Phil Barnett, whom he engineered to place on the Wage Commission that was established to deliver on the minimum wage in addition to a living wage.

Mr Barnett, as previously noted by me, was the fox in the henhouse at the expense of my minimum and living wage initiative and David Burt’s own base, whom he claimed to represent, especially our young Black males from the households of the working poor. All in an effort to ensure that Mr Barnett’s restaurants and others such as Buzz, MEF and other chains, along with Westend Properties, the Fairmont Southampton developer, could maintain a business model predicated on paying poverty-level wages in the hospitality industry.

Mr Burt also had willing helpers in this regard in the form of Lovitta Foggo and Jason Hayward, successive labour ministers, and Chris Furbert, the president of the Bermuda Industrial Union. Who would have thought that these so-called leaders would support a move to allow gratuities to be used in the calculation of basic pay, holiday pay and overtime pay.

This is a well-known tactic globally in the hospitality industry, used to undermine any efforts to produce real growth in wages while exploiting low-cost and usually foreign labour at the expense, in our case, of young Black Bermudians — especially males without a college degree or trade. These men then calculate — wrongly — that they could make more in the booming drug trade.

All of those named above — and I am embarrassed to have to include Cordell Riley, who I recommended be appointed to the Wage Commission — were warned against this by myself, the person who designed the statutory wage regime and the Wage Commission model but who was marginalised politically in 2017.

Global research was clear and definitive: including gratuities as part of basic pay guaranteed that there would be sustained economic unfairness for workers. In the PLP I knew and which my parents helped to create and support, I would not have had to do much convincing, if at all, as to the rightness of that decision.

Those politicians who are being most identified with the status quo include Wayne Caines, childhood buddy of David Burt, Kim Wilson, Diallo Rabain and soon-to-be-departed Walter Roban, the quintessential “status quo” politician.

In fact, the PLP has become the party of the status quo. It will receive no mercy from the electorate, as we saw in the South Africa elections. This is highly problematic for the ruling party, as Bermuda’s status quo has been historically unkind to those overwhelmingly Black who form its constituency.

Bermuda, we need change. That does not mean that you should vote for the other status quo party, the One Bermuda Alliance. It certainly does not mean the FDM, captured as it has been by a Reagan-era ideology from the 1980s, making it even farther to the Right of the OBA and the PLP.

We desperately need a reset of our political, constitutional and economic order, and we need it now. Support the “Movement for Independent Candidates”, non-partisan candidates, at the next election. This is a movement of Bermudians by Bermudians and for Bermudians. All Bermudians, especially those whose voices have been ignored.

• 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