I think I have made my position on how to vote very clear.

The process by which one nation administers another as a colony was meant to allow for a period during which a country whose people were backward in the art of governing themselves took lessons in how to do it from a more sophisticated mother country.

We've been in school for 300 years. Bermudians have attended all the classes, done all their homework and passed all the tests. If you count the last 26 years as our final exam, we should expect pretty high marks.

There's no question in my mind. This country is ready to graduate.

I think of those who say we're not ready to be independent as being like kids who want to stay in school forever ... I don't understand it. Perhaps it's because they like the feeling of being able to run to the headmaster when things go wrong.

I suspect it also has a great deal to do with plain, simple fear of change, of the unknown. Those who are old enough will remember that the arguments against integration and universal adult suffrage in the 1960s were exactly the same as the arguments against independence today.

Bermuda's a wonderful place, they said. Everybody's happy except a bad little band of agitators. Nothing's broke, so why try to fix it? But in retrospect, who in this country can deny that the changes were inevitable, long overdue, and, in the end, enormously beneficial to us? Bermuda cannot hide its head in the sand any longer. The pace of major external change in this human experience of ours has accelerated to such a degree that those who cannot cope, cannot survive. It's as simple as that.

Even the Canadians, whose ties to Great Britain were so slight as to be almost invisible, realised a very short time ago that slight though they were, those ties were inappropriate in the context of the modern world, and had to be cut.

Great Britain does not in any way keep this country afloat. We govern ourselves, we earn our own way in the world, we even pay the salaries of the Governor and his staff. The days when being a part of the British Empire allowed a country and its citizens special privileges are long gone. Great Britain is dealing with pressing and complicated problems of its own in the European context, and cannot be expected to put the problems of dependent territories ahead of its own.

Our dependent territory status means that sometimes, if Great Britain does things, we have to do them, too. So far, we have been able to avoid any great problems as a result, but it is too much to expect that we are never going to have problems, especially in these rapidly changing times. What would happen to us, for example, if the US and Europe began to have trade problems in the same way the US and Japan have recently? What would happen if Europe adopted some rules about the operation of companies which conflicted with our own? The correct course for us in this day and age is to put ourselves in a position in which we have the maximum possible flexibility to preserve and protect ourselves and our way of life. The way to do that is to become independent.

In real terms, those who ask the question "Independent from what?'' are quite right. Independence is a tiny step forward for us. But it is one which makes good business sense, good social sense and one which is long, long overdue.

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