Outgoing Progressive Labour Party MP Arthur Hodgson has blasted Government for failing to radically change Bermuda.

But he believes the PLP will take the country to independence after winning the next election.

He said Bermuda needed a free medical system funded out of taxation and he said the education system needed radical transformation.

Instead, the PLP had merely carried on with policies planned by the United Bermuda Party said Mr. Hodgson.

He told The Royal Gazette: "I am trying to think of where we have made a departure from what was there to the provision of a brand new vision.

"What we have seen to a very large extent is Government as usual. I think people were looking for something different."

"We are not out there leading with new ideas or with new approaches or with courage. We were letting civil servants pass up stuff.

"Even the most revolutionary stuff we have done was on the drawing board before. The civil servants already had it prepared.

"Everything. Berkeley was already there, ATI was already there, immigration policy has remained the same. Even the so-called fast ferries. There was a committee already there.

"We still haven't caught a vision of where we ought to be going. As for education, we need a total change of policy."

He listed education as the key disappointment under the PLP.

Learning should be community based rather than have children bused to super schools in the central parishes said Mr. Hodgson, a former teacher.

"I believe we could have radically transformed our education system.

"We have been scared to do radical things like education. We have just gone ahead and built Berkeley, Pam Gordon built CedarBridge so Jennifer Smith built Berkeley."

He said CedarBridge should have been returned to Devonshire parish to cater for children in that parish while the main schools in each parish should have been expanded to allow senior students to remain in the neighbourhood.

"That's what I campaigned on. That's what I told my voters in Hamilton parish. The best thing they can do with the new Berkeley is turn it over to Pembroke parish."

He said he believed independence would be in the PLP's election platform.

"I would be a little surprised if it wasn't. The PLP has always made it clear it favours independence.

"I would not be surprised if the PLP won the election and two years down the road we were negotiating for independence or a year or immediately.

"I am saying this purely on the basis of our history. No one has confided in me."

Asked if independence could be sprung upon the country with no public information campaign or debate or even a strong pressure group promoting the cause Mr Hodgson said the public cannot be taken anywhere it didn't want to go.

He said it was important for leaders to discuss calmly and logically the direction the country should head.

"I thought as a Minister for Environment I was given the perfect opportunity to present a picture of an integrated society - socially as well as physically.

"And we could move forward in that mode and as such independence would drop like a ripe plumb."

Elected parish boards were something he thought would encourage people to work together, build trust and have the confidence in each other to cut ties with Britain.

"Bermudians would have got used to the idea of working together. One of the problems we have experienced on independence is that when Bermudians are afraid of each other they look to England for protection.

"If we start working together all that fear is removed."

But he said despite the election of the PLP people still had too much fear about speaking out.

"It hasn't changed as much as I thought it would. I thought once the PLP got in power it would knock out all the fear that the UBP had been pumping people with for years."

First elected to the House of Assembly in 1980 Mr. Hodgson said Bermuda needed radical change in its health system.

"We need a national health system. We need to treat health in the same was as we treat education where everyone is covered."

He said basic health should be paid for out of the public purse.

"There should be a clinic in every parish where people can go without feeling they are going to be saddled with expenses they can't afford."

He recounted a tale of a friend who was knocked down and taken in an ambulance but got out because he didn't want to be saddled with the bill because he had no health coverage.

Asked about Government's links with Cuba, Mr. Hodgson said: "I don't know what we are trying to accomplish. I have no idea."

Asked if he agreed with retiring PLP backbencher Reggie Burrows that Jennifer Smith should step down, Mr. Hodgson said he didn't want to rock the boat on the eve of the election.

But he said countries who changed their leader often did better than those who kept leaders for a long time.

Asked about the key changes under the PLP, he points to a sea change in attitude amongst black people as the old inferiority complex died away.