The Premier should ?do the right thing? and call an election so the people of Bermuda can judge his government on its record, said Maxwell Burgess, the Shadow Minister of Labour, Home Affairs and Public Safety.

Mr. Burgess hauled the Government over the coals over the issues of tourism and the troubled Berkeley Institute project in Parliament on Friday.

And speaking to yesterday he re-stated his belief that the people of Bermuda have lost faith in the PLP?s ability to run the country.

Addressing the House on Friday, Mr. Burgess cited the example of the 13 redundancies announced last week at the two Fairmont hotels, commenting that if the tourism industry had ?a sense of hope? then it might have been possible to save the jobs.

He went on to say of the project to build a new campus at the Berkeley Institute: ?Berkeley will not be ready for January. The government fired Pro-Active because it was incapable of opening that school in September, 2004 and now we are looking at September, 2006.

?Now it may be as much as $50 million more (than the original budget.) If that?s true, I?m begging the government to do the right thing and resign from Government and call a general election. Time is one thing but $50 million is quite another.?

His comments were met with an angry rebuttal from Tourism Minister Dr. Ewart Brown who denied that hope needed to be rekindled in the travel industry, and accused Mr Burgess of spreading ?doom and gloom?.

But in an interview with yesterday, Mr. Burgess showed no signs of backing down on his dramatic call for the Government to prove that it has a mandate from the people.

He said that a General Election would have already been called anywhere else in the world over the Berkeley scandal.

?I don?t think that there?s a Bermudian, no matter how much they want to support the Government, that doesn?t accept that this fiasco is nothing short of criminal,? he said.

?All it would take for a General Election is for the government to accept that the moral thing to do, having failed the people, is for the Premier to drive to Government House with a note in his back pocket with a date to go to the polls.

?If there?s not a General Election that we have got to think that the PLP would be looking for an internal election, as the present Government isn?t working.?