The non-partisan Movement for Independent Candidates is real, and it is growing. I would even climb out on a limb and assert that the next General Election in Bermuda will elect a substantial number of independents.

This election will be a highly consequential one and may prove historically to be generational. We won’t have seen the likes of that since the General Election of 1968 that ushered in our present party-dominated system.

I believe that independents can produce the new bright and livable Bermuda that we all deserve and that can meet the challenges of the present and define our future.

The times, they are a changin’

It is my view that only this movement can fill the need for imaginative, courageous leadership that is lacking in Bermuda, and has been for decades where talent in a relatively small community is at a premium. Finding the talent with the vision to foster change locally is essential. This may not be easy to accomplish, but the talent is out there, ready and able.

Ready, willing and able to stop the insanity of partisan party politics.

Notwithstanding his critics, it was Sir John Swan — along with US president Ronald Reagan, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and industry leaders — who engineered the emergence of our very successful international business sector. The Columbia University report of 2010 on our young Black males authored by professor Ronald Mincy highlighted that during the early 1980s a major change to the industrial composition of our economy occurred. Tourism entered its multi-decade decline and almost simultaneously we witnessed the rise of international business.

Thirty years later, with the hardening of global insurance pricing recently, its expansion is continuing. Its success has brought winners — the financial elites — and Bermuda’s overall economy as acknowledged. But there have also been losers. And who are the losers?

The fact of the matter is that international business has hollowed out Bermuda’s economy to such an extent that nothing else can grow. That is, we lack diversity in our economy and large numbers of people cannot find work, especially Black men.

The key reason?

International business has been the chief driver of the high cost of doing business in Bermuda, for decades, and has had a dramatically negative impact on our ability to diversify our economy. I liken our economy to a monoculture that produces only potatoes as its chief cash crop and nothing else. However, to be fair, fixing the above is a matter for the Government by putting in place the right public policies. But first it must correctly identify the problem.

The same thing is happening in the political arena. For example, can anyone really imagine Jason Hayward, Diallo Rabain or Wayne Caines as Premier of Bermuda? What about the invisible man Jarion Richardson or Scott Pearman?

No! All of them are “potato” farmers who are convinced that potatoes are all we need. To them and most of this political class, the economic status quo is fine, notwithstanding that it is unsustainable for many in this country — including what was once our vaunted middle class, particularly the Black middle class.

Another example of the dire state of the economy is that 8,000 Bermudians — roughly 6,000 of them Black — are without health insurance. The merger of BF&M and Argus will likely produce more profits for shareholders, but it also heralds an acceleration in the rise of the cost of health insurance and even more people being uninsured and underinsured. The inevitable result: planeloads of Bermudians fleeing to Britain never to return.

The growing bane of our existence

“I’m officially a free healthcare advocate. This is gonna be my new fight for action: free healthcare in America. Period.”

Those were the comments of Ariana Ramsey, the United States Olympic rugby sevens player, who was quoted in The Guardian after receiving free healthcare at the Olympic Village in Paris, as have all competitors in the Olympics since 1932.

Some of us in Bermuda do believe that access to healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. Even more so in a country that has a gross domestic product of $114,000 per capita as of a couple of years ago.

Kim Wilson, it must be said, is a failed Minister of Health. With so many Bermudians lacking health insurance, it is also the Progressive Labour Party Government’s greatest failure, having committed to address it in its 2017 election platform.

Our healthcare system was originally based on the American model that tied the provision of health insurance to employment — a system predicated on a fee-for-service model dominated by private insurers. Healthcare in the United States is projected to have cost $4.8 trillion in 2023, according to recently released federal data — outpacing the country’s GDP. Per person, this amounts to an estimated $14,423 in 2023, with a projected rise to $15,074 in 2024.

Is this Bermuda’s future? Am I advocating free healthcare with the Government being the sole insurer of healthcare as in a single-payer system? No. But we need to do much better or we will soon see 10,000 Bermudians without health insurance with an ever-growing number of them being seniors and those on low incomes.

Another 2017 promise broken by the PLP.

When I write as I have done of late that our economic model is unsustainable, the state of health insurance for many within our population is Exhibit A. And if it’s not No 1, running neck-and-neck with our growing housing crisis, it’s close to it.

It was not that long ago that the Fiscal Responsibility Panel warned our government and politicians, including the One Bermuda Alliance, that this concentration of market power in fewer and fewer hands was a great vulnerability and unsustainable for an economy as small as ours. The panel’s call was for more competition, not less. As I write, the tourism industry represents only 3 per cent of our GDP. The legendary Fairmont Southampton looks no closer to its soft opening of half of its room inventory in 2025 than was promised by the Government’s favourite developer.

Bermuda greatest economic threat, a riddle we have yet to solve, is the lack of diversification of our economy. The Bermuda of today is not the Bermuda of 1980. That Bermuda had to shift to address the significant changes that were occurring globally throughout the 1980s. Those changes produced the Bermuda we had for the past four decades.

A positive vision for Bermuda

We need forward-leaning leaders such as Sir John Swan. He was responsible for developing 40 per cent of our housing stock, a significant percentage of which was affordable housing during that 1970s-1980s period. Renée Webb and others represent a broadly talented and growing group to navigate Bermuda’s position in this world. It was the work of Sir John among others, and our strong unions led by the Bermuda Industrial Union, which produced our vaunted Black middle class during that period.

David Burt is only the most recent blameworthy cause of our troubles.The more substantial cause, though, is the lack of leadership in this community for the past two decades. Had our ruinous cost of living, erosion of the Black middle class and labour protections been addressed during this period, we might have been far better off today. We do not have the luxury of time any more, if we ever did. The present group of leaders on both sides of the aisle, and the Free Democratic Movement, are simply not capable of doing what needs to be done now — and which should have been done yesterday.

We need politicians united on addressing a positive vision for Bermuda, not focused on loyalty to partisan political parties. We need independent politicians who can focus on a re-emergence of social solidarity in our neighbourhoods, in our families, and in our relationships up and down the country. We need non-partisan independent politicians with the courage and imagination to take us to the bright future we deserve. And we need them now.

• 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