Bermuda does not seem to have produced very much new thinking. However we do not see that as especially important. What is important is that the forum has given a public lead and people are talking about tourism. The forum has attracted attention and it will be a help in getting people to think about what is happening to Bermuda. To its credit the forum included an approved United Bermuda Party parliamentary candidate, Dr. Edward Harris.

We would like to see more such forums, preferably organised across party lines with serious attempts made to deal with tourism and the problems created for all of us. They will be most productive if they stay away from party politics.

As we see it, tourism has some similarities to drugs, it affects us all from waiters to hotel owners and from retail sales clerks to bankers. No one is exempt from the problems if tourism continues to be troubled. This is a tiny place and one way and another we all eat, albeit some less well than others, from the proceeds of our visitors.

One of the things the forums might discuss is what we see as the people's abandonment of tourism. We see very little national concern about the problems of tourism and it is difficult to detect very much care for the future of the visitor industry. Ten years ago if tourism had faced the problems it faces today there would have been a groundswell of public concern. Today, nothing much seems to be happening.

True, we await the Monitor report and there is the Visitor Industry Partnership but these are not rooted in the concern of the average Bermudian.

Bermuda needs to stimulate the national will towards all sorts of small efforts to keep visitors happy.

Bermuda is not as friendly as it once was and it is not as clean as it ought to be. It is increasingly noisy and the traffic more and more chaotic. Thus it is not as comfortable or as relaxing as it should be for visitors.

We should not burden people on holiday with our own hostilities and resentments and never with our politics about which they can do nothing. We should provide helpful service with a smile even to those visitors who can be unappreciative and somewhat tiresome. Our problems and our stresses are not the visitors' concern and they are on holiday to relieve their own stress and their own concerns.

These are all things which individual Bermudians can do something about and on which there should be public consensus. The time is past for an attitude of "let Government do it''. All the predictions that Bermuda would "kill the goose'' with high prices and bad attitudes are coming true. It is time for solutions.