Back in the saddle again

They say that a week is a long time in politics, so perhaps it's unsurprising that the nine months that I’ve been on hiatus feel like an eternity.

In that time, the Government has pushed forward a number of controversial new initiatives, including anti-fronting legislation, the Workforce Equity Act, and Goodwill Plus. They have suggested that non-Bermudians should stay out of local politics, and gone all the way to the Privy Council to try to stop the press publishing more allegations of official misconduct. Bermuda has seen the launch of several new blogs, including three favourable to the PLP, and the political parties have discovered Facebook. Then last week, the Government called an election.

It was the latter announcement that finally persuaded me to restart this blog (although I came close earlier this year, when the impact of the shockingly discriminatory anti-fronting legislation became apparent). Given the awfulness of some of the legislation passed or proposed during the last year, and the increasingly anti-democratic tendencies of Premier Brown’s government (for example: the widespread use of special development orders; the attempts to gag the media), I am genuinely fearful of what will happen to Bermuda if Dr. Brown is given a fresh, five-year mandate. As I am not yet a Bermudian, I cannot vote in the upcoming election. However, I can attempt to influence public opinion through my writing, and I feel that I have an obligation to do so. At least if the current government is returned to office I will be able to say that I did my best to prevent it.

That’s not to say that I will be playing down the Opposition’s faults. I have some serious problems with the UBP too, including their failure to commit to extending the Human Rights Act to include sexual orientation, and their pledge to give the taxi drivers more money without requiring any improvement in service. Although they have criticised term limits and the anti-fronting legislation, I have not yet heard them commit to repealing those laws should they win office. And despite their professed love of openness, they have yet to answer a question I asked on their Facebook group in August about why they appear to have abolished their shadow ministry for racial equality and economic empowerment. Nevertheless, I think they currently represent the lesser of two evils.

As you may have noticed, I am no longer accepting comments on this site. My reasons were eloquently summarised by tech blogger Joel Spolsky earlier this year: “When a blog allows comments right below the writer's post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody ... nobody ... would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words." That’s not always true, of course: sometimes commenters do have interesting and worthwhile things to say. But the signal-to-noise ratio isn’t high enough for me to justify the time – and libel risk – involved in comment moderation. Besides, as Spolsky points out, if you have something to say there’s a better way to make yourself heard: "Get your own space, write compelling things, and if your ideas are smart, they'll be linked to, and Google will notice, and you'll move up in PageRank, and you'll have influence and your ideas will have power.” The proliferation of local blogs during my time on hiatus, some excellent, others less so, has demonstrated the viability of this approach. Those of you who comment on my posts on your own site still have the ability to publicise your comments here by sending me a trackback (see the "Related Links" section of each post).

I don’t know how long I’ll be back for. Stuart Hayward was bang-on when he recently described Bermuda’s political environment as “toxic”. At a minimum, I will be writing on this site until the election, but whether I’ll keep going beyond that, I have yet to decide.

Right now, though, it's nice to be back in the saddle again.