The PLP’s election loss was primarily due to bad timing

It’s amazing that someone such as Larry Burchall who failed to win a primary to be selected as a Progressive Labour Party candidate prior to the 2007 election, would contend, as he did in his column of last week, that a successful PLP candidate, who, having won his seat comfortably at a time when many PLP candidates were losing theirs, was somehow one of the major factors that cost the PLP victory, at the 2012 general election.

Consequently, he seemed to forget or ignore one little inconvenient fact, and that is that the successful candidate that he referred to; that being myself, also ran in that 2007 election during the height of the so called “Big Conversation”. He also ignores the fact that the party, then under Ewart Brown’s leadership, won handily. 

So much so, that within months after that election the United Bermuda Party would implode and eventually cease to exist. 

My advice to Larry — as a now successful candidate and MP — is that if he should ever seek to be a candidate again, he should:  A) get rid of that upper middle class English accent which he has obsessively cultivated; but which most people view as an affectation. 

And B) stop publicly referring to himself as he did a couple of months ago as “unblack”. 

Both of which I think, would be major liabilities if one is going to put oneself forward as a candidate for a party that derives most of its support from Bermuda’s working class, black community. As my election demonstrated, authenticity does matter to voters.

According to Larry, in the aforementioned piece of last week, “…the PLP was trying its best to present a diversified and gentler face to the voters. The PLP was trying to get away from Dr. Brown’s legacy of bitterness and revenge.” 

Few “formerly” black people can channel classic white racism and the racial stereotypes that go along with that, as well as Burchall. 

Throughout this section of the piece one can find it somewhat littered with these noxious stereotypes such as the “angry black man” trope and the “revenge” fantasy — like out of some Quentin Tarantino film — Django Unchained comes readily to mind, that still plays on white consciousness today. As in, blacks are just waiting to do to us what we have done to them, for over four hundred years.

Larry is determined to reveal and confirm to white Bermuda that their worst fears about black people, and their leadership, are indeed true. 

By way of contrast, he, the “unblack”, will protect them with his very own life, if need be; should all else fail. 

Reality though leads us to a different conclusion than that which was advanced by Burchall last week. 

Undoubtedly, the key reason we lost the election boils down to one thing and one thing only; and that’s timing. 

Recession

And that can be reduced to the following: the election should have been called earlier in order to avoid sending the Bermudian electorate to the polls during the worst headwinds of the current recession, and to take advantage of the then disarray and disunity within the opposition ranks.

With respect to the economy, recent figures for 2012 from the Department of Statistics via their annual employment survey reveal that for the first time since the study began four decades ago, the Bermudian economy lost approximately 2,000 jobs and just over 1,000 of those jobs were jobs held by Bermudians. 

To use a hurricane metaphor, the recession went from being a category one storm in 2010 to a category three last year and the political and financial debris is all around us for everyone to see.

Therefore, the decision not to go to the polls early, during that 2011 period, would have to be considered a strategic error of historic proportions.

 Does Larry absurdly believe that I contributed to the loss that Colonel Burch suffered in his election in Warwick for example? And what is he really saying about those outstanding voters of Pembroke South East who elected me, besides offering them a passive aggressive-style insult? 

All of us, frankly, would like to know.