The Association for Due Process and the Constitution provided the following attachment to its press statement yesterday:

“Senator Calvin Smith (former Government Statistician) speaking outside the Senate following its closing session on Thursday, 20 December 2001 - broadcast on VSB. Tape supplied by VSB and transcribed by Warren Cabral, attorney-at-law. The tape was clear and distinct. The original is available for inspection on request.”

“Now what really disturbs me was that a lot of this stuff was very substantial and one of which being the constitutional change. Now I mentioned constitutional change and my opposite number Mr. Pettingill immediately took me apart; and he was referring to one act only and that's one where we did away with capital punishment.

What he noticeably did not refer to, in fact he never named any specific legislation, that I think two pieces we put in place constitutionally are landmark... is... are landmark legislation in Bermuda:

1) The annual registration. The need to have to; we have now have an open registration. Register once and you come back again when you change your address. Now what that did was to work against the poor very heavily. Everybody in every country knows that that's why in England it's so easy to register.

When we changed that it meant that we empowered the poor and by extension vast numbers of the black population were empowered. When we return to single seats. When we put through the legislation on single seat constituencies we're gonna do the same thing, because the areas with large numbers of voters per constituency are Devonshire, Warwick and Pembroke. Very large.

They will also have between them about almost 50 percent of the black population. So it means again that the vote of the black population becomes strengthened. Strengthened considerably.

For that reason alone I can understand the Opposition getting very excited about this and wanting to stop it. Not because they are interested in people's rights but simply because it's going to weaken their position which has large dependence on a white vote.”