The short answer to the question posed by the headline above is: everything!

It is hard to imagine that there is anyone who has been keeping up with the state of affairs in our country who would refute that we are heading in the wrong direction.

There are many others who think that we are on the edge of a downward spiral that we will never recover from. There are others who will go as far to say that we have passed the precipice and are now in free fall.

So, the next General Election will cause Bermudians to go to the polls deciding whether they will continue to support the Progressive Labour Party that has spent the last 22 of 26 years to get us here or whether they will choose another party in which we will invest our hopes of getting us out of this mess.

The word “mess” is not being used lightly. The facts speak for themselves. Our tourism industry has been decimated, especially over the last decade. All measures by our current government to breathe life into it have failed.

The greatest evidence is closure after closure of our major hotels and dwindling tourism air arrival numbers. The crushing knockout punch was the closing of our largest hotel, the Fairmont Southampton, a few years ago.

The non-stop controversy surrounding its closure witnessed a major rift within the PLP with the then finance minister quitting the Cabinet and then challenging David Burt for leadership. In the aftermath of that episode, with covert and explicit accusations flying left, right and centre, the Fairmont Southampton remains closed and unlikely to ever reopen again.

This is in spite of David Burt’s repeated promises and misleading statements to convince Bermudians to the contrary.

It is an albatross around David Burt’s neck, the PLP and the country as a whole. If my hunch is correct, we have not heard the last of this fiasco yet and heads will roll for the behind-the-scenes shenanigans related to this matter.

That mouthful is the tip of the iceberg of bad news for the tourism industry and our country as a whole. The national debt did not exist when the PLP took power in 1998. At the time, Bermuda had a surplus in the sinking fund set aside for a rainy day. Today the fund has been severely depleted.

The national debt is now in the billions and will continue to grow in spite of the Premier’s sleight of hand and his silver-tongue talk of balancing our budget.

Even if he were able to do so on the face of it, it could only occur by having our roads littered with potholes, keeping our healthcare in shambles, along with the education system, and continue to allow our public infrastructure to crumble compared to what it used to be.

We are simply not generating enough revenue to maintain our nation under PLP governance. Even government workers are feeling the pressure to do more with less while their pension fund dries up.

They are being told that there is no money in the government coffers so they will have to work until they are in their seventies due to the poor state of the economy.

The inescapable issue of immigration factors prominently in the downward spiral of our country. About a decade ago, Bermuda was in a position to institute win-win immigration policies. The PLP played politics with the issue to the extent that it cornered itself only to later offer the exact remedy that Burt was vehemently against while in opposition to the extent of forcing a government shutdown.

Today, payroll tax has declined along with the jobs that are no longer available to Bermudians or guest workers. To make matters worse, we are increasing the unsustainability of the situation because the number of people retiring and fleeing to other countries is greater than the number of children being born and entering schools.

Of course, I can go on and on endlessly about the state of our country and what is at stake between now and late 2025 when the Premier is statutorily forced to call an election. The PLP will no doubt start to tell voters that it needs more time and to give the party another chance. They will do this even while the party is crumbling in front of our very eyes mirroring the country it has created.

Government minister after minister is bailing, while scandal after scandal is made public leaving us to wonder what is really going on.

Bermuda, what is abundantly clear is that we can no longer afford the “can-do-nothing-right” PLP government any more. What is even clearer is that the PLP will not or cannot change. Therefore, it will be up to the electorate to vote for that change on election day.

It is shaping up to be a choice between the One Bermuda Alliance, which, in its one term in office, attracted over $1 billion of inward investment and began increasing tourism numbers to reverse the PLP’s downward spiral. The other two choices are the Free Democratic Movement and the independents.

Either way, the next time Bermudians go to the polls, the choice could not be clearer in spite of its growing complexity.

• Vic Ball was a One Bermuda Alliance senator from November 2014 to July 2017, and more recently a candidate in the 2020 General Election in Constituency 9, Smith's West