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United Bermuda Party MPs and former MPs have been public bickering pretty constantly these days over who is a reformer and who isn't a reformer.

If by chance you've missed what each of them said, I can sum it up neatly for you: "I'm a reformer but everybody else got in my way."

The party, clearly, is chock-full of reformers and has been for years. So what happened to the reform?

The problem is that there's hardly anything to reform.

The UBP goals, their mission, their values are fine. In fact, they're really quite admirable.

The policies and programmes they pushed in the last two elections, I believe, were excellent.

In fact, they were probably more in line with what Bermudians need and want than what the winning Progressive Labour Party offered.

Even the smug satisfaction from which they once suffered - as most governments do - was knocked out of them quite nicely by three successive election defeats and a string of well-publicised, high-level defections.

So what's the problem?

The core of the problem, quite simply, is that the UBP has too many whites and too few blacks.

And the reason it's so hard to solve is that it's a self-perpetuating kind of problem.

A lot of blacks won't join or even support the UBP because it's way too white, which means it stays white, which means they still won't join, which means....

Of course, you could try to break the impasse by getting rid of the whites instead.

That seems to be the tack taken by some so-called reformers - purge the party of a few prominent white MPs and voila! You have a political party whose public appearance, at least, is a lot less white than it was.

The problem, of course, is that you have a pretty dull and empty party when your white guests leave before the black guests come in the door.

And if your black guests don't come anyway, you have no party at all.

Our nameless new party - the "New BP", as some people are calling it - seems to be tackling this problem from the opposite direction.

Instead of purging senior white members, it's walking away with the same policies and programmes and leaving the senior white members behind.

As I said before, the UBP's fundamental weakness has been race - real, perceived, present and historic. So the New BP'ers might be latching on to the only real reform that counts simply by walking out, even if they're still carrying the old UBP policies and programmes in their suitcases.

The word "reform" is bandied about so much these days that it's tempting for the UBP to claim that anything that moves is "reform", and every problem is a roadblock to "reform".

Most of the accusations that have been hurled back and forth by frustrated UBP members and ex-members are really just the daily gripes that are common in any political party.

They are things like arrogance and lack of communication, failure to reach out to the young, or the old, or the middle class, or the working class, and having weak candidates or a leader who fails to inspire the masses.

The change made last week in the UBP constitution, to give more people a say in who is selected party leader and deputy, is a case in point.

The UBP's incredibly shrinking parliamentary party made the change almost essential. But the party, in its desperate quest to find something that can be trumpeted as reform, called it "a significant milestone...a progressive, positive move and a major change in the way we operate."

But dealing with this kind of stuff is part of the day-to-day operations of running a party.

They are problems that have to be fixed, to be sure, if the party wants to claw its way back to the top of the heap.

But they hardly warrant the grandiose title of "reform". And fixing them will not solve the party's fundamental problem of race.

Until reformers can figure out how to lick that problem, they'll have missed the one key thing that needs reforming.[[In-content Ad]]

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