The following is a an article written by columnist Gavin Shorto for this month's Bermudian Business magazine, which they have both kindly agreed to have republished here.
I felt that it deserved a wider airing, as it provides some counterbalance to the one-sided version of the formation of party politics in Bermuda that has been, and continues to be peddled for partisan political gain.
Julian Hall, and others who speak for black people in Bermuda, have recently been claiming that the birth of the United Bermuda Party was nothing more than a product of white fear of losing economic and political control.On the other hand, says Mr Hall, the Progressive Labour Party, at its birth, was intended to “meld basic Christian principles and ethics concerning how we should treat and deal with each other, with the broader aims and goals of the Bermuda Labour Movement with a view to pursuing social and economic justice for all the people of Bermuda.”
Anyone who was around at the time knows those two assertions are an odd way of putting it, to say the very least. The whole truth is more complex than Mr Hall would have us believe, and much less convenient for those who like to portray the PLP as the flower of entirely noble instincts and actions.
The whole truth is joined at the head, hip and knees to what was going on outside Bermuda in those days, when the world was still being roiled by the effects of the Second World War.
Once, Britain had been the most powerful nation in the world...the sun never set on the British Empire, they used to say. But the war wrecked its economy. Any sliver of hope that it might somehow have been able to hang onto its Empire was destroyed by the entry onto the world stage of the United Nations.
British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan privately called it “this Frankenstein which we have created”, and no wonder, because at its creation, the UN accelerated the process of fighting against colonialism in a big way. It short-circuited the power of colonial nations to deal with often violent independence movements, by giving them a voice, and a cloak of political respectability.
At the time of the creation of Bermuda’s two political parties, the world had been watching as country after country after country fought for and won independence from Britain, France and other colonial countries. Sometimes, perhaps especially in African colonies, the struggles were violent and ugly. Very often, violence became a way of life in those countries, and the world today is still struggling to deal with the consequences.
Perhaps we now understand that many countries which opted for independence were taking a step back in order to move forward into a better future. But while Bermudians of the 1960s would have been very aware of the steps backwards, it was too early for movement forward to have become obvious.
These days, we are used to knowing more or less what the country thinks about issues because of the benefits of modern polling techniques. Now, it’s easy to extrapolate backwards and surmise that a big majority of Bermudians in the 50s and 60s would have been dead set against independence. They would have seen the idea in the light of what had happened in other countries – communities and economies damaged and sometimes destroyed by the process – and would probably have thought of independence as reckless in the extreme – an absurd risk for an Island in our fragile line of work.
But in those days, it was a guessing game, and the founders of both political parties would have constructed their platforms on the basis of what they guessed (and no doubt hoped) the voters would find attractive.
The founders of the PLP knew all about post-colonial politics. Given Bermuda’s segregationist history, the fact that power had always been in the hands of a tiny white oligarchy, the gap between rich and poor, the absence of social services, and so on, Bermuda seemed the classic case of a colony that should be gasping for sweeping and rapid political change. The PLP’s founders must have thought it would be easy to take power simply by opposing everything Front Street stood for.
But the character of the Bermudian population turned that assumption on its ear. The PLP’s founders fell afoul of the same thing that drove Dr Gordon to despair of the labour movement – the fear and the lassitude that kept Bermudians from taking action to turn their hopes for a better society into reality.
That wasn’t the only political mistake the PLP made. They proclaimed themselves in favour of independence. They went over to Britain and had tea with the Russian Ambassador.
They hired a political advisor named Geoffrey Bing, whose reputation, to a conservative, was only slightly better than that of Beelzebub himself. He was as far to the left as you can get and still be called a socialist. As Attorney General of Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast), he helped its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, deal with the very high level of political unrest that characterised his time in office. Bing was AG when the infamous Preventive Detention Act came into effect, legislation that made it possible to arrest and detain anyone suspected of treason without reference to the courts.
So the formation of the UBP was far from simply a result of white fear of losing power, it had to do with the fear of both races, given wings by the nascent PLP’s apparent left-wing radicalism, that political change was going to be the apple that got us cast out of Paradise.
It also had to do with the realisation by Sir Henry Tucker and others that Bermuda had penetrated more than half-way into the 20th Century with a society that owed more to feudalism than contemporary best practice.
No one in Bermuda at the time, in politics or not, had any accurate idea whether change might be accompanied here by the kind of violence seen elsewhere. But it was a cast-iron certainty that failing to do something about improving Bermuda society would be the very best way of encouraging radicalism and violence.
For Sir Henry Tucker and his supporters, it was time to get with it...time for sleeves to be rolled up, and for action to be taken to ensure the sweeping changes that were necessary were managed by capable people of both races who had Bermuda’s best interests at heart. They saw the alternative as being torn apart by that peculiar political maelstrom that was destroying countries the world over.
It was something of a miracle that they actually managed to do it – the task was no less than a complete re-engineering of Bermuda’s society and its infrastructure. The list of things to be done was thoroughly daunting: A Constitution had to be negotiated. The remnants of segregation had to be swept away, and a platform created on which an integrated Bermuda could stand. There was no labour legislation, no hospital insurance. Even the poorest families had to pay for their children’s education. There was no planning department, no central bank, no financial assistance and no guarantee of any kind of human rights.That Bermuda, led by the UBP and pushed by the PLP, managed to cram a century’s-worth of progress into a generation, without falling apart at the seams, is an extraordinary tribute to the resilience and good sense of the whole community – something to be shouted from the rooftops. Denying it is a mean-spirited, outrageous assault on the truth.
