It may be that long-time Southampton MP Reginald Burrows finally felt that he could speak his mind last Friday when he broke with his party on the question of how it should go about seeking Independence.

For decades, the Progressive Labour Party's policy has been that Independence should be decided via a General Election with the winning party (assuming it favours Independence) then having a mandate to take the Island to nationhood.

The United Bermuda Party has argued in recent years that Independence should be decided via a referendum, and Sir John Swan put the question to the people in 1995, who rejected it, albeit with some PLP members boycotting the vote.

The UBP has now gone a step further in the wake of the often divisive and dictatorial debate of the last three years on boundary changes in saying that it will put any constitutional change to a referendum.

Mr. Burrows did not, as Dame Lois Browne-Evans noted on Saturday night, desert the party in the mid-1980s, even though he had ample reason to do so as a leading PLP moderate at a time when others of similar views were being expelled or were leaving in disgust.

That demonstrates just how loyal Mr. Burrows is to his party. Given that, it is interesting that Mr. Burrows now supports the referendum approach to seeking Independence over a General Election. This does not mean that Mr. Burrows does not support Independence; he does and has for a long time.

But he has said, presumably after deep reflection, that it is fairer to the voters to make Independence a single decision, rather than to confuse it with all of the other issues and personality questions that must arise in an election campaign.

Mr. Burrows is right, and it is a shame that a voice of reason and courage will not be in the House of Assembly in the next session, regardless of which party wins the election. The fact that he has made his position public at this moment may well have been intended as a warning to Premier Jennifer Smith not to put it in the PLP platform.

When Ms Smith called the Election last week, she left the question open, reiterating her previously stated position that the PLP had said it would not pursue Independence in its first term, and might or might not in its second.

If other PLP MPs and candidates feel as Mr. Burrows do, it may not be possible for Ms Smith to include it in the platform anyway, at least as a mandate. At any rate, with the most recent polls suggesting the UBP has more support, a debate on Independence could prove to be disastrous for the PLP among swing voters.

It is possible that the PLP could state that it will "examine and make a recommendation on" the question in its next term; but after the Boundaries Commission and Caricom debates, few voters would believe that such a process would end as anything other than a full endorsement of Independence.

So with Mr. Burrows and possibly others opposing the traditional General Election approach, the PLP might be better of putting the whole question and focusing on other issues that the voters will see as being more pressing.