Opposition Leader Grant Gibbons faced two challenges in replying to the Throne Speech on Monday.

He needed, as he has had to since he became leader of the United Bermuda Party, to tackle the Government's blueprint for the next year, pointing out its omissions and errors while painting a picture of how the United Bermuda Party would govern Bermuda if it had the opportunity to do so.

His second task was to settle the uneasiness within the ranks of his own party over his own leadership. That may have been the harder task. There is no doubt that there is unhappiness, largely driven by polls that suggest that the UBP is not benefiting from the Progressive Labour Party's own unpopularity.

Overall, he largely accomplished the first task and he went a long way to achieving the second.

The Reply tackled a number of issues on which Government is failing. Dr. Gibbons successfully isolated the Government's waffling on Independence and rightly criticised its willingness to let this debate drag on. By calling for a quicker debate followed by a referendum, Dr. Gibbons seems to be in touch with public feeling and is also in tune with his own party, who, whether they are Independence opponents or adherents (and there seem to be fewer of the latter than there once were), can read the polls.

Dr. Gibbons spent a good deal of time on education, and was right to do so. This is the Government's Achilles heel, and its failure to improve results is stark. On the whole, the UBP's ideas on education make sense. Giving schools more autonomy, judging them on their results and holding teachers accountable through licensing are all progressive ideas that place responsibility for education with schools and parents, not in a centralised bureaucracy.

Dr. Gibbons also rightly stated that Bermuda's schools are de facto segregated between those who can afford private education and those who cannot. If the majority of students in public schools — where the failure rate is 50 percent — are black, then that suggests that the economic gap may never be bridged, and that is a fearsome prospect.

That division feeds into the issue of economic empowerment, because economic success is directly linked to education. And the UBP has made strides in tackling this issue with real and tangible proposals for closing the economic divide, some of which the Government is only now adopting.

And he rightly says that the PLP's use of racial slurs during elections and at other times is no way to improve race relations and may even irreparably harm them. The row that erupted later in the Debate over Housing Minister Sen. David Burch's use of the term "house niggers" only served to underline that point.

There's much more to the Reply, but these three areas suggest that Dr. Gibbons scored points while presenting a credible alternative.

Did he convince his own supporters? That depends on what they were looking for. If they want raise-the-rooftops rhetoric and lashings of charisma, then he probably failed.

But if they want competence, intelligence, sincerity and dedication, then Dr. Gibbons did his job. If Dr. Gibbons does stay on as leader, the UBP needs to convince the public that these are values that have been lacking in the Progressive Labour Party and that the UBP under Dr. Gibbons can improve Bermuda by using them in Government.