Tuesday's televised speech by the Premier was billed as being about the "Age of Empowerment", a concept that was first aired by Finance Minister Paula Cox in the Budget Statement.

It has been suggested that this is just another piece of spin, replacing slogans like the "New Bermuda", which is now apparently old hat, and the Social Agenda, which is still in place but rarely mentioned.

That suggestion may be unfair, at least until it can be measured by actions and solid achievements. Judging by Mr. Scott's speech, however, this new age has all the feeling of business as usual.

Few can dispute that empowerment is a worthy goal, not least because of the Island's legacy of discrimination, which favoured whites, and because of the problems of prosperity and high costs, which make every day life for ordinary Bermudians precarious.

More broadly, the world is changing. For Bermuda to survive and thrive, it must have a workforce whose skills depend more on knowledge and less on muscle, and a society in which ideas from all sectors inform public debate and decision-making. So a democracy that is more participatory and less hierarchical is almost certainly needed.

Of course, empowerment can mean different things to different people. By the same token, almost any programme or policy can be made to fit within its framework.

That also makes it a bandwagon that almost anyone can jump on, and it is clear that at least one motivation for the speech was a reaction to the emphasis the Opposition United Bermuda Party has placed on the issue, going so far as to establish a shadow ministry devoted to it.

On Tuesday, Mr. Scott tried to position the Progressive Labour Party as the real party of empowerment, and did this by pointing both to past achievements and to ongoing programmes.

From a rhetorical point of view, it sounded like a laundry list, largely because it was, covering big issues like tourism and housing and smaller ones like giving computers to senior citizens.

From a news perspective, it was very nearly barren. If one of the key elements of "news" is for information to be "new", there wasn't much there, especially after the lengthy debates on the Budget that covered much of the same ground.

Still, Mr. Scott is entitled to to encompass the sum of the PLP's achievements and goals in a package, all driving towards the notion of empowerment. Whether Mr. Scott accomplished that is debatable. Some of Government's programmes are working. Initiatives like the constitutional changes accomplished by his predecessor, Dame Jennifer Smith, the introduction of the Ombudsman and the public access to information initiative are all good examples of empowerment.

But Mr. Scott had to admit that other programmes have been less successful, notably on housing. He said: "While Government has increased the amount of housing under rent control by some 3,000 units and has housed and provided mortgages for almost 800 families since 1998, the upward pressure on housing prices continues unabated and an increasing number of families are adversely affected by the irony of our prosperity."

The implication is that it has not been for want of trying that the housing problem remains. Instead "prosperity" is to blame. But Government was warned at the time that it increased the scope of rent control that it would do nothing to solve the problems of housing supply, not least because it would be a disincentive to housing construction if landlords could not realise a return on their properties. Similarly, the Loughlands development that Mr. Scott also trumpeted could only happen when Government agreed to remove the tourism zoning from the property to allow housing to be built. Again, that "empowerment" could have been done years ago but wasn't.

Mr. Scott expressed pride over the move to make North Hamilton an economic empowerment zone, but the UBP proposed an even more ambitious programme in its 2003 election platform. Similarly, Mr. Scott's major drive for improving race relations was the resurrection of Citizens Uprooting Racism in Bermuda (CURB), a UBP government initiative that the PLP dropped like a stone when it came to power.

To be sure, when the PLP was in opposition, it constantly complained about the UBP stealing its ideas, and that's the nature of politics. But when Mr. Scott attempts to separate the PLP from the UBP as the true party of empowerment, it is peculiar to see its programmes lifted from the other party without credit.

And, as with the "Social Agenda", many of the programmes that were trotted out are things that any Government should be doing anyway.

It is particularly notable that there was no mention of any ongoing constitutional reform. There is ample evidence that people of all political stripes are dissatisfied with the Island's current political system, but you would not have known it from Mr. Scott's speech. The only constitutional reform Mr. Scott envisions is Independence (and there was no mention of it in the speech, oddly) and it seems clear that voters taking part in a referendum — the ultimate political act of empowerment — would flatly reject it.