A House of Assembly debate on changes to Bermuda’s corporate tax structure erupted into a race row on Friday night, with a government minister accusing the Opposition of denigrating Black people.

Diallo Rabain, the Minister of Education, also claimed that the island suffered from “polite racism” in which the island’s Black-led government was repeatedly castigated by political opponents for incompetence and mismanagement of the country’s finances.

Outrage from the government benches came after the One Bermuda Alliance put forward an amendment to the Corporate Income Tax Act, which will see multinational corporations with a revenue of more than €750 million (about $808 million) pay a 15 per cent tax.

The OBA gave guarded support for the “landmark” legislation during Friday’s debate, but also warned that the island was stepping into unknown territory.

Before the debate, the party tabled an amendment to the Bill, proposing that any funds from a potential tax windfall should be used to pay off the national debt and bolster the island’s increasingly failing infrastructure.

The amendment was eventually dismissed by the Speaker of the House on the grounds that it did not comply with parliamentary regulations.

Despite that ruling, Progressive Labour Party MPs called for OBA senator and shadow finance minister Doug De Couto, who had spoken about the amendment, to be sacked from the Tax Reform Commission, an independent body of politicians, civil servants and finance experts set up to advise the government on tax affairs.

Mr Rabain led the charge for the Government.

He accused opposition MPs of maintaining links with the United Bermuda Party, the now-disbanded political organisation that was last in government in November 1998.

Addressing Deputy Speaker Derrick Burgess, Mr Rabain said: “You’ve been around long enough to know the UBP handbook that some of our Members opposite literally grew up with next to their cribs.

“They heard it over and over, and you can’t even really blame them for the comments that they make because it’s just ingrained within them to automatically make statements that bring into doubt that persons that look like me and you just simply can’t manage money, can’t run the country.

“It’s become so subtle and so ingrained in the language that they speak and it just becomes disappointing to hear it in 2023 when the Bermuda public clearly rejected that notion in 1998 and continues to reject that notion.”

Mr Rabain said that he first felt that Bermuda was “a very politely racist place” when he went to university in the United States.

He said: “The things that I would accept as normal language, my colleagues in school were like ‘what is going on in your country that would be acceptable to a Black person walking down the street’.”

Taking aim at Dr De Couto, the minister said: “It’s actually tiring to listen to his innuendo statements that he makes on a regular basis, whether it be in social media, comments to the media and the like.

“It’s really frustrating to hear because we’ve been there and we know that to hear what they’re saying without saying it is, ‘these guys can’t do it’.

“It’s political posturing, that’s all it is, at a time when we can least afford it, when we all should be singing from the same hymnbook, a time when we should be setting the bar high for other countries that are looking at us and saying, ‘Look what they are doing, look how they are working together, look what they are accomplishing’.

“But instead, we’re getting the same old tired line that … as I said, we can’t even blame them because it’s so ingrained in their psyche they don’t even realise that they are being offensive when they say it any more because they’ve said it all their lives.

“Political posturing is not what we need today, and that’s all we have seen and continue to see from Members opposite. I ask them to put Bermuda first for a change and be genuine about it, be sincere about it.

“Make it feel like you actually do care that Bermudians need to come first in their country and that we as a collective can get this done and get this across the line.

“Don’t give us lip-service. Don’t fool our people. Don’t pretend that you have changed when you have not. Have that ‘Come to Jesus’ conversation with yourself in the mirror and say, ‘how can I reject my social programming that makes me sublimely try and point out that those people over there can’t get it done because of who they are’.”

Up next was Lieutenant-Colonel David Burch, the Minister of Public Works, who called on Dr De Couto to be dismissed from the Tax Reform Commission.

Colonel Burch said: “I agree with everything that people on this side have said, but I noticed that my colleague who just spoke forgot to do something, so I’m going to do it for him.

“And that is to ask the Minister of Finance to remove that person from the committee because it doesn’t appear to me as if in any way shape or form they are interested in following the procedure.

“So I make that request to the Minister of Finance to remove the member and invite the OBA to appoint somebody else.”