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The time to decide who to vote for is not right now. Save that for the next election. We must fight the temptation to view this current crisis - and it is a crisis - as a competition between political parties.

It is not.

It is, quite simply, a contest between right and wrong, between an open and democratic society and a secretive, dishonest one. We cannot have the deeds and misdeeds of our country's leaders - be they PLP or UBP or anybody else - covered up.

We cannot have police raiding newspaper offices, and hauling away alleged whistle-blowers for long nights of interrogation, no matter who runs the country.

We cannot have police stopping reporters on the street to prevent them from doing their legitimate and necessary jobs, under any party's Government.

We cannot have our leaders - UBP or PLP or anybody else - refusing to answer serious allegations of wrongdoing and gagging the media instead.

In short, we cannot have our Government - be it PLP or UBP or anything else - run by intimidation, interrogation and attack.

These are things have nothing to do with political policies and platforms, or with strategies for improving education or the economy or healthcare.

These things are simply wrong in a free and open democratic society. They are outrages, plain and simple and non-partisan.

Yet these things are happening right now in Bermuda. We must insist that they stop right now. We cannot afford to wait until the next election.

And Bermudians who saw the front page of the daily Royal Gazette on Tuesday or Wednesday should hang their head in shame at what is being done to their country by their leaders and by their police. There was the country's independent auditor general being taken away by the police for a night of interrogation.

The suspected crime, it seems, was being a whistle-blower on Government misdeeds.

Desperate

There was the Premier, desperately trying to get the courts to gag the media from writing about things he fears would reflect badly upon him.

There was the Premier, with one of his former Cabinet colleagues, launching libel cases against most of the media in Bermuda - and then using this to try to get the media gag extended almost indefinitely. One thing that all these outrages have in common is that the Government and the police's priority was not to protect the public - which ought to be their one and only duty - but to protect themselves.

It is hard for ordinary citizens - PLP or UBP or anything else - to avoid thinking the obvious: That neither our Government leaders nor our police ought to be doing anything, as they perform their public duties, that they need to hide.

The citizens of this country have a right - indeed, they have an urgent need - to know and understand the way their elected leaders are going about their jobs.

They cannot do that if their leaders refuse to answer allegations, gag the media and haul alleged whistle-blowers away in the back of police cars.

When your Government hides from you and treats you with contempt, when your Police focus on chasing down leaks instead of criminals, when the Auditor General is arrested and the media is gagged, who is left to protect the public?

Whether all this makes people swing towards one party or another doesn't really matter now.

What matters now is what is right, and what is wrong.[[In-content Ad]]

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