When Cheryl Pooley-Alves was approached by to talk about her experiences within the Progressive Labour Party, she initially declined.

The 45-year-old, white mother-of-two was looking for a job and didn?t want her past political persuasions to jeopardise her chances.

She found work and decided to speak to this newspaper after all. But she says the fear instilled in her in the 1980s and 1990s, when she was an active and opinionated member of the PLP, and lost or failed to get jobs because of it, remains.

?I have had prospective employers ask me about my political past in an interview. I may be paranoid but I still believe that there are ramifications.?

Mrs. Pooley-Alves? time with the PLP ? from the early-1980s to 1991 ? was a positive one. She was a union activist and joined because of a desire to fight for workers? rights and social change.

She says of her PLP colleagues: ?I felt great love with them. Those guys were brilliant. I had total love and support. They were so relieved to find someone who was white who agreed with their social agenda.

?I was completely and utterly embraced by them. In that entire time I never experienced anything racist.?

She stood twice as a parliamentary candidate in Pembroke West Central but eventually became disillusioned.

She felt the PLP began to place too much emphasis on race. ?When you did a press release you?d have to put the word ?black? in there,? she claims.

?Everything was always brought down in terms of being black by the PLP on a political level.?

She believes that distanced whites who might otherwise have backed the PLP.

?We weren?t appealing to them,? she says. ?The PLP gave the impression or the perception that the only people who ever experienced problems in life were black people.?

Mrs. Pooley-Alves, of Smith?s, eventually defected to the now-disbanded National Liberal Party before giving up politics to start a family.

She didn?t vote in the last election and now believes the PLP has ?turned around and done everything it criticised?.

Though she thinks the party has done some good, she also believes Government boards are not independent, that nepotism takes place at a high-level and that the promised ?Bermudianisation? of the market place has not happened.

She also believes the PLP continues to use race ? ?the old baggage? ? to score political points.

Like many, she?s not sure the PLP ? or Bermuda ? can ever move on, though she wishes it would.

?There are a lot of disenfranchised people out there,? she says. ?We are at a stalemate right now.?