19 August, 2014

Dear Sir,

Hasn’t Rev Nicholas Tweed shown himself to be a bad-tempered and intolerant person? It seems he wants to be more like Al Sharpton’s brand of confrontational political and racial activism than the gentler and more effective kind preferred by such great men as Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King.

His letter in answer to that of Canon James W Francis was nasty and disparaging. The Anglican Church of which Canon Francis is a member had no credibility, he said, because it was in past years “on the side of the racist oligarchy.”

Canon Francis’s opinion Rev Tweed described as “regurgitating a narrative derived from the media without checking it against the facts.”

That’s a charge that could be levelled against Rev Tweed himself, although the version of the truth about PRCs that he favours is not so much the media’s as it is the Progressive Labour Party’s, for whom he is acting as a surrogate in the fight against the OBA.

Rev Tweed says he objected to “the underhanded and deceptive manner in which the government set about using what Chief Justice Kawaley called a ‘sleeping provision,’ to subvert the Immigration and Protection Act of 1956 and the subsequent 1994 and 2001 Amendments to the Act for a purpose that was NEVER intended.”

That’s one bassackward way of putting it. The truth is more straightforward, if less convenient for confrontational activists.

1. The Government is not being underhanded or deceptive, but is trying to obey the law, as governments should. The provision to which the Chief Justice referred was one passed by the Progressive Labour Party during its time in office. It could be called ‘sleeping’ because its importance was apparently not clear to the government at the time, neither was any light shone on it until it became involved in a legal challenge. Dealing with that challenge, the Chief Justice ruled that the PLP provision’s effect was to allow a path to the grant of status to a large number of PRCs.

Whether the provision was passed by the PLP government in order to ‘subvert’ the Immigration Act is something Rev Tweed would have to ask his PLP friends. And while he’s having that conversation, he might also ask whether the PLP’s present position on PRCs might be little more than an attempt to divert attention from the terrible mistake they made with Immigration legislation while they were in power.

2. There is no piece of legislation that can be passed to roll back the effect of this provision. If people have applied for status correctly under the law as it stood when they applied, the Minister has no power to reject them unless their applications are fraudulent in some way. For the facts, Rev Tweed should read analyses recently published and available in local media by two lawyers, Alan Doughty and Kevin Comeau.

Rev Tweed expressed scorn for those who were silent about the white oligarchy in past years while “the blood of our sons and daughters runs in the street.” That’s a phrase that is popular among activists, as we all know, but it has little application in Bermuda.

Rev Tweed is what you might call a foreign commentator on Bermudian dissent. He was born in London in 1963, and has spent almost all of his life out of Bermuda. So having missed the period during the 1960s and 1970s when people actually did riot in the streets of Bermuda, he won’t have realised that injuries to demonstrators were remarkably light. Among civilians, the police and members of the Bermuda establishment, however, there were many injuries, and several deaths.

But then most confrontational activists like the good Rev Tweed do seem to feel they are exempt from any need to stick to the facts, don’t they?

Grooveray

St George’s