Premier Alex Scott has pretty much delivered on his promise of forming a Bermuda Independence Commission that broadly reflects the community.

The 14-strong group roughly matches the racial make-up of the Island's Bermudian population and has a number of young members as well as some people who have retired. It is not especially well-balanced in terms of gender, but gender equality has not been Premier Scott's strong suit.

International and local business, labour and the public service are fairly well-represented. The Commission can call on its own members for expertise in law, statistics, tourism, small business and a range of other areas. That is all to the good.

While there are at least two members who are vocally pro-Independence, there is no one on the Commission who is a strong opponent, based on the public record anyway. In a way that's a shame, although it may prevent meetings of the Commission from degenerating into across the table shouting matches.

It is a little more disturbing that the Commission's two key legal advisors, former Attorney General Dame Lois Browne Evans and Solicitor General Philip Perinchief are both well known proponents of Independence.

It will be interesting to see whether they can restrict their advice to objective legal answers to questions. If they cannot, they may taint the Commission's credibility. The Commission's task, at least as far as it has been described, is to gather information and to present it to the public.

To that end, the Commission will have to be fiercely objective; no easy task given the subject it is tackling.

In essence, it is being asked to come up with a Green Paper which would lay out the options for Independence and the pros and cons of the issue.

It will have to look at the costs of Independence, especially diplomatic representation, external defence costs and the cost of joining the United Nations and other international organisations.

One vital question the Commission will have to answer is whether Bermudians would continue to have the right to UK passports and with them the rights of working and living in the European Union. The British Government has been very guarded on this question, but it must be answered.

The Commission's other task is to objectively weigh what Independence would add to a sense of national pride and the feeling that "we are all Bermudians", which assumes that some Bermudians don't feel that way now.

The Commission will have to decide how much validity this viewpoint has and what difference Independence would make. This may be the hardest challenge the Commission has since this question is subjective at its heart. Objectively assessing it may be impossible, particularly since it requires the members to accurately predict the future.

While the Commission is supposed to be objective and merely gathering information, it is inevitable that readers of its final document will be looking for an answer to that question: How would Bermuda benefit from Independence and what would it be giving up in doing so? What it will not do is examine whether Bermuda should decide the issue by General Election or Referendum.

That is a shame, because it is hard to decide where you are going without knowing how you are going to get there.

That's the reason the United Bermuda Party has decided not to take part, although its stronger reason ? and it is right ? is that it does not want to risk being bound to a document, no matter how objective it turns out to be, that it may have to criticise later.