Bermudians should have been alarmed by the speech made to the Bermuda Industrial Union’s Labour Day Banquet by former Premier Ewart Brown.

He said, among other things: “I am calling for an organised effort to take back the government … we cannot afford to wait three more years for an election.”

So much for Dr Brown’s respect for democracy and the rule of law.

It’s interesting to compare his speech with that of Bermuda Industrial Union President Chris Furbert. He told the audience that Bermuda would suffer if political parties, unions, employers and government did not cooperate to confront the economic problems we face. The Premier, Hon Michael Dunkley, echoed those words, saying: “We must put country first; not politics, not party and not personalities. The people and country must be first.”

Chris Furbert’s way forward is quite obviously a great deal more constructive than putting effort into trying to topple the government. Bermuda is, as everyone knows, confronted by a host of difficult problems. If the Progressive Labour Party keeps putting all its effort into complaining and manufacturing scandal in an effort to thwart the government’s efforts to repair the economy and get people back to work, Bermuda will quite obviously suffer. At the very least, recovery will be delayed.

Is that putting the people and the country first?

Was Marc Bean, Leader of the Opposition, putting people and country first when he described 2014 as the year of a choice between struggle and silence? There are those, he said, who count on fear, intimidation and economic terrorism to keep you silent.

Fear, intimidation and economic terrorism. Really? Economic terrorism?

Mr Bean must think the language of fantasy, not reality, will best get him where he wants to go, which is to give unqualified support to his mentor, Dr Brown, and to tear down the OBA government at any cost, even at the cost of sacrificing Bermuda’s fledgling economic recovery.

Dr Brown is a man whose good qualities — strength, decisiveness and intelligence — are often overwhelmed by bad ones — impatience, arrogance and the belief that he is the smartest man in Bermuda.

Those bad qualities allowed him to praise union leaders at the banquet, especially BIU President Chris Furbert, but also to fire two young female workers at his office, Bermuda Healthcare Services, who had complained to the press about their conditions of work, and acknowledged that they were trying to introduce union representation to their workplace.

Those bad qualities allowed him to agree to Bermuda taking in four Uighur prisoners from the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay without consulting anyone — not the public, not his Cabinet and colleagues and certainly not the Governor, who the Constitution requires him to consult. Indeed, Dr Brown presided over the creation of a division between the government and the Governor the like of which Bermuda has never seen.

Those bad qualities led him to deceive his own PLP colleagues over and over again while he was in the House — for example, when he told his party whip, the opposition and the media that he was going to delay introducing a bill allowing gambling on cruise ships, then sprang it on its unsuspecting opponents in the House of Assembly the following morning.

Those bad qualities led to his own colleagues and supporters describing him as little better than a dictator. And to an open revolt against his rule in the House of Assembly, with Cabinet Ministers and backbenchers openly calling on him to resign. One of the Ministers he fired in the wake of that debacle was Terry Lister, the very man he urged to “come home and be on the right side of history” in his Labour Day speech.

Those bad qualities cost the people of Bermuda hundreds of thousands of dollars which went to pay his Warwick campaign manager, Andre Curtis, for the most extraordinary boondoggle in Bermuda’s history — faith-based tourism.

We could go on for a long time about Dr Brown’s “mistakes”.

During his speech, he gave his own answer to the question of how the PLP lost the last election by paraphrasing Malcolm X — “We were had, we were took, we were hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok.”

Frankly, it seems more likely to us that PLP supporters might say that of those in the PLP Government who led Bermuda into the mess it is currently in.

And it is what we might say to PLP supporters whose memories are short enough to allow them to admire Dr Brown’s speech — Don’t get hoodwinked again! Don’t for the sake of Bermuda’s well-being.

Editor’s note: On occasion The Royal Gazette may decide to not allow comments on what we consider to be a controversial or contentious story. As we are legally liable for any defamatory comments made on our website, this move is for our protection as well as that of our readers.