It’s one of the drawbacks of life on a small Island, the occasional tendency to become distracted by the minor details of public life at the expense of seeing the broader picture. Bermudian politics exploits this failing on an all too regular basis.

Scarcely a week goes by when Bermuda’s public debate doesn’t devolve into a distraction, a diversion, a raucous sideshow quite as unedifying, contrived and scripted as a professional wrestling bout.

Our political parties are both adept at grabbing our collective attention and focusing them on irrelevancies.

The trivial is elevated, the elevated trivialised (or simply ignored), in favour of secondary or entirely manufactured issues. Matters of substance are routinely displaced by the spectacle and shock value associated with the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical.

While Bermuda has never wanted for elected officials who take their obligations to the Island seriously, the fact is too many local politicians give the appearance of being more fixated on the spoils and perks of office than in its responsibilities.

For them the acquisition and retention of political power is an end unto itself, not a means to various socially constructive ends.

They and their coteries of vocal hangers-on are in permanent election campaign mode, sowing the wind with discord, mistrust and conflict and hoping to reap the whirlwind on polling day in the form of an annihilating defeat for their opponents.

This is the very definition of polarity politics. The dynamics of a perpetual Us Against Them cycle in which one side must utterly defeat the other is ultimately self-defeating, particularly in the context of a small, fragile society like Bermuda.

But conflict is, of course, built into Bermuda’s Westminster political system, the export variety, one-size-fits-all version of British democracy which London exported willy-nilly throughout the decolonisation period which began in the 1950s.

Britain’s accelerated post-Second World War disengagement from its imperial territories was a rushed and untidy affair.

As little regard was paid to the two-party system’s suitability to local circumstances and conditions as was demonstrated by British Colonial Office mapmakers when they were arbitrarily drawing the borders of empire (as Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill once boasted how he created what is now modern day Jordan with “the stroke of a pen, one Sunday afternoon in Cairo”.)

Traditional ethnic, religious and tribal rivals abruptly found themselves living in newly independent artificial countries carved out of administrative areas originally created more for the convenience of British bureaucrats than the local populations.

Once the British withdrew, these antagonisms were institutionalised in a two-party political system which, by its very nature, exacerbated internal conflicts rather than serving to resolve them.

Too often these emerging states fragmented along politicised sectarian lines.

Governing parties were tone-deaf to minority interests and issues; the Opposition parties’ role to oppose for the sake of opposing was often freely interpreted as license to disrupt, destabilise and sabotage.

In too many instances this imposed political structure invariably collapsed, giving way to one-party or even one-man rule.

Although Bermuda’s legislature dates back to 1620, the Westminster system was not introduced here until 1968 when it provided the by-then stock British response to local demands for long-overdue constitutional reform.

Some argue the two-party system was the inevitable equal and opposite reaction to decades of indifference to calls for a necessary structural overhaul of Bermuda’s politics on the part of the merchant aristocracy which then dominated local affairs.

If nothing else, proponents say, Westminster-style politics provided a guaranteed, constitutionally-entrenched avenue to power for those who had traditionally been the most powerless in Bermudian society.

But it’s instructive that in the 1960s Sir John Cox, one of the Island’s leading patricians who only belatedly recognised the existing status quo was unsustainable, and Lois Browne Evans, the foremost champion of reform, shared only one thing in common other than the fact they both represented Devonshire in the House of Assembly.

Both were implacably opposed to the introduction of what the future Dame Lois called a “hand-me-down constitution(al system)” not tailored to Bermuda’s specific needs.

Sir John, then the Speaker of the House, retired from politics rather than contest the 1968 election — the first held under the Westminster system — predicting an already divided community would grow only increasingly polarised when votes began to be cast for two parties formed largely along racial lines.

Today this same winner-take-all system is routinely and cynically exploited for party political advantage by self-serving grandees on either side of the Parliamentary aisle.

And the need for reforms which reflect conditions in 21st century Bermuda rather than the Island as it existed in the mid-20th century becomes increasingly obvious.

Politics as usual in Bermuda serves only the needs of politicians with a vested interest in seeing the current system maintained.

The rest of us would benefit from consensus, cooperation and a new emphasis on our common interests.