January 30, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
Long night of the clucking tongues
14 hours of hot air on a motion of no confidence that was doomed from the outset
A UBP led motion to oust the Premier from power - an exercise in futility that would, essentially, have required the Government to deliver a vote of no confidence in itself - had predictably been crushed.
And it had taken until 5am.
If ever there was an advert for the merits of a dictatorship, this was it.
The motion was supposedly in defence of democracy.
But this was democracy at its most cumbersome: A roll call of wordy politicians pontificating at length before coming to a conclusion that had been inevitable from the start.
If the Americans have any sense they will send the rest of the Guantanamo inmates to Bermuda and sit them in the House of Assembly for the afternoon: they will have given up Bin Laden by sundown.
The crowd in the public gallery ebbed and flowed throughout the night as folks flitted in and out. Some, a little red-eyed and dressed for town, were clearly checking in on their way back from the bar. One man in the gallery bore a striking resemblance to an erstwhile Royal Gazette reporter, apparently there, off duty, hoping to witness Brown's fall.
If anyone had been playing a drinking game based on the number of times Martin Luther King was name-checked over the course of the debate they would have been 'full-hot' long before the Premier rose to admonish the UBP 'power-grab' in the early hours.
There were notable exceptions to the drudgery. Dale Butler gave a lively, at times, comical display, summing up the lack of consultation thus: "Jeez, did I miss a meeting?"
Randy Horton's measured condemnation of the Premier's leadership was intriguing and Dr Brown's riposte to his critics - a qualified apology if ever you have heard one - was fiery enough to wake even Alex Scott from his backbench slumber.
Scott, quite understandably, had dozed through much of the process.
Darius Tucker summed up the level of the discussion by speculating that the move to release four innocent Uighurs from Guantanamo Bay might help get his hairdresser off the stop list.
At least he stayed on topic. John Barritt gave us lengthy excerpts from his life story (nice speech, wrong debate), Terry Lister speculated about the type of cars people drive today and Kim Swan bigged up his 'country boy' credentials. At the same time, a handful of security guards - scheduled to knock off at 8pm and with weekend jobs to go to the next day - waited, with the rest of us, for it all to end. If time limits on speeches ever come up for debate, can we all have a say?
When the motion finally went down 22-11 with one UBP no-show and one abstention, it was to the surprise of no-one except perhaps the partisan bloggers who had managed to convince themselves that Dr. Brown really was going to lose.
The debate might have meant something if it had happened two weeks ago - before the decision to bring the refugees to Bermuda had been taken.
But at this stage it was little more than empty posturing by Bermuda's Parliamentarians.
Imagine for a minute that Dr. Brown and Colonel Burch had put the Uighur dilemma before the House?
They would have spent another seven years in Gitmo before the MPs had finished talking.
Editor's note: James Whittaker reported on Friday's marathon debate here on our website. Sign up today for our breaking news alerts.
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