After having read the story carried by The Royal Gazette on Saturday that highlighted the more salient aspects of the recent debate as it unfolded in the House of Assembly, I decided to convey the following.

That news report which ran under the headline “Opposition attacks OBA’s ‘trust deficit’” was a fairly interesting and informative snapshot of the proceedings and was ably conveyed by young Bermudian reporter Nadia Hall.

I will, however, offer one small clarification. I did not state as reported that “85 to 90 per cent of whites voted for and will likely vote for the OBA”, but rather that its white voting base represented approximately 85 to 90 per cent of the OBA’s overall base of voters, as it once did for the United Bermuda Party ... something quite different.

And, in fact, that figure may be a little high with the real figure in terms of the white voting base of that party representing probably about the 80 to 85 per cent of their overall base as related to me recently by two former UBP political leaders.

The key question that I sought to answer, however, was, do white voters in Bermuda vote as a monolith far exceeding that of black voters? And the answer is a resounding yes.

In terms of white voting support for the UBP and now the One Bermuda Alliance, pre-election polls going back a number of decades, along with proprietary data now held by both parties, does confirm that white voters do vote monolithically, with about 97 to 98 per cent of white voters historically voting for the UBP and now its successor party, the OBA.

Since the election of 1968, which ushered in modern constitutional politics under universal adult suffrage and spanning almost a full half-century, white voting behaviour — save for the brave 2 to 3 per cent on average who do vote Progressive Labour Party — has largely not changed.

I was 11 years of age back in 1968 and I will be 59 years of age on May 11, just to place all of this in somewhat of a bewilderingly personal context.

And, remember, close to half of those white voters have been foreign-born. This has been owing to the racially skewed immigration trends and subsequent grants of status over the preceding period. Census statistics support my claim.

The Government, led by Michael Fahy on this issue, of course, would ask us — much like investment firms — to believe that past performance is no guarantee of future outcomes. They are asking us to suspend belief and embrace the view that these soon-to-be newly minted, largely white status holders will behave from a political and even economic standpoint differently than did previous waves of enfranchised white migrants, during the postwar era.

Black Bermudians who were marginalised politically and economically by these aforementioned racist immigration trends and their small but growing number of white allies are not buying it and neither should they.

The new manta is: caveat emptor or buyer beware.

The other fascinating and disturbing fact around this issue is that for far too long it has been considered taboo to even mention this in polite company in Bermuda. Indeed, politicians from that side of the aisle, particularly the black OBA politicians, go to inordinate lengths, even today, to deny that this is true. Like their UBP predecessors did during my two-decade-long effort to highlight it, they are determined to perpetrate the great deception of Bermuda politics.

As previously highlighted in a self-penned op-ed published in this paper in 2012, Mike Winfield, chief executive of ACBDA and a former UBP campaign manager during the Sir John Swan years, summed it up succinctly at a public forum that explored the connection between race and politics in Bermuda.

Winfield told the assembled that the formula for electoral success when it came to the UBP was fairly simple: keep the whites on the political reservation — not hard to do apparently — while going after the black, so-called middle-class vote.

Unfortunately, decades later, the same formula is still a reality and continues to hinder our growth, and thus our ability, to evolve into a more mature democratic polity as stated on Friday.

• Rolfe Commissiong is the Progressive Labour Party MP for Pembroke South East (Constituency 21)

• Note: This opinion was submitted before Sylvan Richards, the Junior Minister of Home Affairs, tabled the Bill on immigration