In your editorial entitled “It’s Groundhog Day every day in Bermuda politics”, you painted rather a bleak view of Bermuda politics.

You seemed to say that the so-called Westminster system of Government could not succeed at all in a biracial community. It was a constitutional arrangement the British “foisted off” on Bermuda and other territories when they were hurriedly liquidating their empire-building business.

Unless we formed a National Government, you seemed to say — presumably like those of Mr Chamberlain, Mr Baldwin and Mr MacDonald in Britain in the 1930s — we would not succeed in getting Bermuda out of the mess it was currently in, and would probably never be able to govern this community effectively. Both parties, you said, remained wedded to the concept of politics as a vehicle solely for the acquisition and consolidation of power — “a means to rule by relentlessly dividing and re-dividing Bermudians.”

A bleak view, indeed.

I disagree on a number of points.

Of all people, you will know, Sir, that the Westminster system is simply one form of democracy, a political system that has its roots in the ancient worlds of Greece and Mesopotamia. Democracy has not been bettered as a system for running countries. It has at its root the admirable notion that every citizen should have an equal say in the way his country is run. How that works differs from country to country, but most democracies have a two-party system of one type or another.

The National Governments in Britain were not brought about because the two leading British parties couldn’t agree, but because the Cabinet of the Labour Government could not agree on how to solve the Great Depression of the 1930s. National governments have not continued there, and have not caught on elsewhere, because they are a watering down of the democratic principle that each citizen should have an equal say in the government of his country. If all are supporting the same political view, however that occurs, constructive dissent has been suppressed and the right of many citizens to have their views taken into account has been derailed.

When people say that the party system cannot work in places like Bermuda and other former colonies, they generally mean that the population is not sophisticated enough to effectively manage or work the system. I reject that view, both generally as a statement of the sophistication of the populations of former British colonies in the 21st Century, and specifically, as a statement about the sophistication of the population of Bermuda, which to me is unquestionable.

There is no question that politics is a difficult and frustrating business. Sometimes depressingly so. But the extraordinary thing is that it works! In the end, governments always seem to muddle through.

Certainly, the shortcomings of the two-party system don’t seem to have driven the world’s major democracies, including the United States and Westminster itself, into the arms of a watered-down democratic system.

Would it be nice if politics were a polite, hugging and handshaking sort of business? Perhaps it would. Perhaps that happens somewhere in deepest Scandinavia… I don’t know. But if it does happen there, it happens nowhere else.

One suspects most people think that at its most combative and difficult, politics is a rough-and-tumble guarantee that the views of every citizen are being given proper consideration. There is always going to be some level of the rough and tumble in democratic politics, and how far that goes in either direction depends on the politicians and their parties.

I happen to think that the One Bermuda Alliance is delivering a refreshingly new level of business-like politics to Bermuda. We have dealt with things like the movement to decriminalize marijuana and eliminate conscription in a straightforward, broad-minded and responsible way.

We are coming up with and applying solutions to Bermuda’s many problems in a focused and deliberate way. The good thing is that the OBA understands that all our decisions must serve one overriding mission, which is to move the Island away from decline toward a future that meets peoples’ needs. Our focus is primarily on economic recovery, because of its potential to help more people, more quickly than anything else. But we are also looking to clear aside societal cobwebs that hinder individual freedoms and opportunity, and you can see that in the expansion of human rights and the recent move to finally make freedom of information a reality.

Now, against that background, the Opposition can’t seem to stop having hysterics, throwing their toys at the wall and opting out of the process when they don’t get their way. Does Bermuda need that? Is it helping the process of fixing Bermuda’s problems?

Those are questions you need to discuss with Mr Bean and his associates.

Meantime, the OBA is getting on with it. So far, we are doing well enough that one can say a National Government is not yet anywhere near the table.

Susan Jackson, JP, MP, is the One Bermuda Alliance Chairman