January 30, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
Part II of II
The people's choice - Brown or Bermuda?
Like any other citizen, a premier must live within the law. However, a premier, in addition to his common man duties and responsibilities, is also expected and required to know and maintain and uphold all national law. He is not above that law.
Every country and every community is at risk if persons to whom special powers, special authority, and special privileges are granted go beyond or outside the limits of their authority. If policemen act outside their lawful authority, they must be stopped. If citizens act outside their lawful parametres, they must be stopped. If politicians act outside their lawful authority, they must be stopped.
There are three ways to deal with an errant politician. A senior politician or a political party removes him or her from office. The politician removes himself or herself from office. The law gets retroactively changed.
As explained in Part One, authority is set out in the Bermuda Constitutional Order 1968 [BCO 1968]. The errant politician is Premier Dr. Ewart Brown.
It is unlikely that BCO 1968 will be retroactively altered so that the actions that brought those four Uighurs to Bermuda can be retroactively legalized in any acceptable timeframe. So changing the law is not an option.
The fact of deliberately neutering Cabinet, thus intentionally ignoring the people of Bermuda when taking a decision that affects them, is a serious breach of trust and shows a lack of the kind of good sense that a good politician is expected to exercise.
A decent politician who has made such a huge breach of known protocol, of established law, and of plain commonsense, would recognize that and would then remove himself from office. That, indeed, is the time-honoured tradition of the U.K.-style Westminster system. But it is not an American tradition. What is common in America is the Richard Nixon or Marion Barry or Rod Blagojevich style of personally stiffing it out - and stiffing the public - until inevitable bitter final failure.
In the absence of decency, and in a vacuum of commonsense, the only step left is removal from office.
The PLP has yet to mature past the point where it is a settled governing party. That point will come only when the PLP recognizes that it is not an 'Opposition Party' newly fallen into government; but is the GOVERNMENT itself. From my long association with the PLP, I know that this annoying philosophical atom still needs to be smashed.
As in many atom-smashing actions, once that happens, enormous power will be released.
The power that needs releasing is the power that is needed to better harness the full energies of the whole of the PLP, so they can better manage and better run the Bermuda of 2009 and the future. Under this Premier, the PLP - especially its neutered Cabinet - seems capable only of purring or mewing.
National problems
During this law-breaching Premier's tenure, public as well as internal party discussion has been stifled while public division and national problems have grown. Bermuda's Public Education system remains on course for meltdown. Bermuda's life-sustaining Air Arrivals have plummeted below levels last seen forty years ago. Drive-by shootings and killings have become common - in Bermuda.
Other nations are ganging-up and treating Bermuda like a pariah country. Bermuda's national economic model has shifted radically and significantly - thus requiring a shift in Bermudian responses.
Bermuda needs far better national management than it has recently been getting. In Bermuda's national interest, the PLP needs to remove this errant politician, get a better or different person in place, and get back to focusing on managing the Bermuda of 2009 and the future - not, as has been happening, having someone managing Bermuda as though it was the Bermuda of 1969 and the past.
In the best interests of Bermuda the nation, Premier Dr. Ewart Brown should have the decency to resign as Premier. If he lacks that decency, the PLP Parliamentary Group should have the good and common sense to remove him from that office - and in so doing, demonstrate political growth and a higher level of political maturity.
In the absence of personal decency, Party commonsense, or Party maturation, the electorate must - as an act of national self-preservation never again elect, as government, a Party that is so lacking in good and common sense, and that never grew out of its past as Opposition.
The national choice is clear - Brown or Bermuda?
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