BERMUDA is at times something of a tiny mid-Atlantic political science laboratory. Here it is possible to witness regular small-scale experiments that demonstrate the truth of universal laws governing all civic societies.

Most recently the Premier himself demonstrated the exactitude of what could be called Lord Acton's Second Law of Political Behaviour ? there is no worse heresy than allowing high office to sanctify the individual holding it.

The sanctification of the incumbent Premier would indeed amount to a secular form of sacrilege ? a sacrilege against logic, a sacrilege against common sense and a sacrilege against Bermuda's long-term self-preservation instincts.

The Premier does have an ever-dwindling band of apologists. Some do indeed worship the logical quicksand he prefers to walk on and ascribe non-existent plaster-saint elements to his character. Others are more realistic. They recognise his shortcomings but believing any criticism of his often self-contradictory positions still necessitates a closing of the Government ranks for the greater good. To this end, this week the Premier's loyalists engaged their media rapid-response teams to try and clarify what the Premier meant during his recent comments to the Caribbean Consultative Council in London.

As per usual, they did not so much explain his entirely unanticipated remarks on the socialist programmes his Government apparently plans to introduce over the next decade as attempt to explain them away.

Perhaps only in Bermuda could a Premier and his more lickspittle acolytes so violently complain that he had not been misquoted, but in fact had been quoted entirely accurately.

But this Premier has long subscribed to a perverse form of logic. His statements do not mean what they say; rather they mean what he tells you they mean after the fact, usually when urgent damage control is required. All of the iron-jawed but essentially toothless propaganda emanating from the Cabinet Office in recent days underscored this point in no uncertain way.

Given the Premier's latest round of twisting and manoeuvring (he has long been the Chubby Checker of Bermudian politics), it's clear that neither high office nor anything resembling fixed rational standards can consecrate his thought processes.

Bermuda's Weapon of Mass Distortion, as he is known in some quarters, has once again struck to potentially devastating effect. The fall-out from the socialist manifesto he unveiled in London now threatens to poison what little remains of his own credibility as well as Bermuda's credentials as a laissez-faire international business jurisdiction.

A Ten-Year Plan of social action; the introduction of social engineering; diminishing wage disparities between the "Haves" and "Haves Nots" ? the Premier seemed to be reading from one of those combination Bibles/drill books that were the programmes of the doctrinaire left until the early 1970s.

His language was replete with clich?s taken from the garbage pile of history. Such tropes were discarded years ago, even by the rump of the left, ending up on the scrap heap long before the deadweight of the sterile ideas they expressed crushed the vitality of liberal democracy and market economics.

Couching his presentation in such recycled platitudes, the Premier presented a manifesto in London that simultaneously fused the authoritarian and bureaucratic tendencies of old school socialism with his own bombastic, almost delusionally overreaching style.

The Premier's later protestations notwithstanding, it is in fact possible to draw general inferences from the very specific statements he made in London.

Such inferences lead to the unavoidable conclusion that the Scott Government is preparing a sharp left-turn in Bermudian affairs. And Bermudians would be foolish to ignore such unambiguous warnings.

The Premier and his apologists, presumably taking dictation from him on bended knee, say none of what was contained in his remarks should be interpreted as advocating a socialist agenda for Bermuda. Social engineering, they maintain, is a neutral term that has even entered into the language of the academy. Hardly. The last time social engineering was discussed straight-faced in academic circles was at least a generation ago. And even then its advocates were fighting a highly publicised last stand against the withering criticism of former socialists such as Carl Popper, who in defecting from the ranks of the left denounced the devastating and dehumanising effects of such strategies in state-sponsored coercion.

even those few remaining states that actually do employ social engineering techniques to intimidate their societies into pliant homogeneity never actually use the term, top-heavy as it now is with sinister Orwellian connotations.

When the phrase is employed in universities, it tends to be during post mortems of long-dead 20th century authoritarian states ? invariably because centralised efforts to engineer the thinking, beliefs and outlooks of societies invariably helped to accelerate the collective demise of such regimes.

Given this Premier's unparalleled record of failure when it comes to structural engineering projects, what he would achieve in attempting to re-engineer Bermudian society does not actually bear thinking about. A Bermudian cultural revolution as very ill considered and ineptly executed as the Berkeley project would hardly produce anything resembling a model society.

The Premier's most controversial comments in London, of course, touched on Government plans to diminish the ever-widening income disparities in Bermuda. But that does not mean his Government is considering a redistributive form of taxation.

On the contrary. It means the introduction of mentoring programmes. Nothing more sinister than having Brian O'Hara and Evan Greenberg hosting school children who aspire to be international insurance executives.

Quite why it would take what the Premier described in London as a "major cross-Ministry initiative" ten years to organise and implement after-school programmes that could be set up in a matter of weeks was not explained. No surprise there. This Premier sports more loose ends than a Spanish shawl.

His pronouncements on Government's alleged aversion to income tax are hardly reassuring coming as they do in the train of both the Literacy and Household Expenditure surveys.

With their cross-referenced batteries of questions on levels and sources of individual income, it was difficult to avoid the impression these studies were both statistical stalking horses intended to glean income data in relatively unobtrusive manners.

Such a conclusion tends to be reinforced by new Statistics Department's stipulations requiring employers to provide Government with detailed income information on all employees in Bermuda.

This information is being collated for a purpose. And the most likely purpose is one that's sending a chill up the collective backbone of the financial services industry. Some of the larger companies are indeed respectfully declining to provide such data, citing confidentiality agreements with members of their staff. Presumably this is a corporate/Government stand-off that will eventually end up before the courts.

REVOLUTION is underway in Bermudian affairs, a shadowy and slow-motion revolution, but an ongoing upheaval nevertheless. Its effects can be seen in the official indifference to the Bermuda Housing Corporation scandal; the Government's ongoing collusion in the Berkeleygate mess; the clumsy attempts to avoid what the Premier knows would be an unwinnable referendum campaign on Independence.

This revolution is camouflaged by a conspiracy of silence from the Cabinet Office, one that is only occasionally broken by the meandering and deliberately obtuse statements of a Premier who is far less interested in clarifying than further obfuscating the truth.

The Bermudian people, it seems, do not know what is best for them and must be directed, organised and spurred-on by legislators who supposedly do. That way despotism lies.

No wonder this Premier is so increasingly mistrusted, even among those whose egalitarian instincts are repelled by some of the more pronounced social imbalances in the Bermudian community.

For not only has this Premier upheld Lord Acton's Second Law of Political Behaviour, he is rapidly becoming the one-man embodiment of the First Law ? the tendency of power to corrupt and absolute power to corrupt absolutely.