WHEN it comes to public support for a Bermuda Government the first line of defence is always knee-crawling deference, the fall-back position an extreme form of fact-evading denial.

The deference involves supporters conferring a sense of infallibility that a Mediaeval Pope might have envied on the Government of the day. When evidence of failings becomes too conspicuous for even the truest of believers to rationally ignore, then a wilful if grudging blindess to these faults comes into play. The mental drawbridges are raised, the iron-studded portcullises come slamming down and inconvenient facts are simply not allowed access to the barricaded minds of the faithful.

Putting critical faculties into long-term hibernation and then, should they begin to stir, resorting to an ideological siege mentality is certainly not behaviour that is unique to supporters of the present Government. Such contorted mental gymnastics have been commonplace ever since party politics were introduced to Bermuda, the standard British two-party formula that was preordained to cleave a bi-racial society along largely ethnic lines.

Zealots on either side of the Bermuda political divide manifest a faith-based approach to politics, one that's not open to challenge, informed criticism or second-guessing. Faith, as political-convert-turned-political-atheist Arthur Koestler once mused, is a wondrous thing: it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe a three-day-old herring is a race horse.

So to the current Government's dwindling number of hard-core devotees, its policies and programmes represent a stable of thoroughbreds. To the rest of the island, the stench of rotting fish is becoming as overwhelming as it was during the final unhappy years of the United Bermuda Party's long tenure.

Since the end of its uneventful first year on the Government benches, when the transition was so very seamless it appeared a charismatic understudy had finally assumed a leading role he had spent a lifetime preparing for, the Progressive Labour Party has engaged in non-stop ideological sleight of hand to divert attention from its increasingly manifest shortcomings.

These political conjuring tricks haven't convinced any but the most unsophisticated political cultists. Consequently, many PLP voters - particularly the first-timers, who plumped for the once-and-seemingly-future Opposition in the wistful belief it could not make a worse mess of things than the UBP did during its last term - are now either wilfully blind to what's going on around them or, as is increasingly the case, terminally disillusioned.

Twice a week garbage collection. Historic wrecks legislation. Fast ferries.

Those are the three incontestable achievements of this Government. These initiatives hardly represents the massive socio-economic slum clearance that was promised preparatory to the laying of the foundations for a "New" Bermuda. On almost every major policy front the PLP approach has been marked by what are, at best, holding actions or, at worst, the incremental erosion of advances that were made under previous administrations .

To point out that this Government has failed to do its homework in any number key policy areas should not suggest the critics are charter members of one or more of the vast tribal conspiracies that are still routinely blamed by the fanatics as the covert string-pullers in Bermuda. Such facile condemnations are as insulting as they are trite, the name-calling hardly providing sufficient camouflage to disguise the mushroom-growth of unpleasant facts that has spread around the Cabinet Office.

The same goes for the skewed equivalenices and the false analogies that are also being trotted out, the hollow claims that because scandals occurred on the UBP's watch the anything-goes approach that seems to characterise the PLP can be morally condoned. It cannot.

The debacle over the termination of the Bermuda bases agreement is a marked case in point.

The US routinely makes provisions for repairing ecological damage when it withdraws from overseas military outposts. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent over the last decade restoring the environmental wastelands left behind at former Cold War bases in Germany.

That $11 million and a pat on the head are manifestly insufficient to cover the environmental depradations visited on a tenth of Bermuda's land mass is self-evident. Even Panama, a country the US invaded when its CIA-subsidised strongman began supplementing his off-the-books income with pay-offs from drug runners and money launderers, received a generous settlement to clear the toxic slag heaps around the Canal Zone.

Given the current Government proposed retroactively charging the US rent for use of the Bermuda bases to make up Budget shortfalls as late as 1995, when the Pentagon was already striking its camps here, its complete collapse in the face of routine US and UK diplomatic foot-dragging is all the more remarkable. And all the more shameful.

The same holds true in any number of other areas.

Those charged with responsibility for crafting public education remain secreted away in what is not so much an ivory tower as a bastion of institutionalised cretinism, continuing to squander money - and young minds - on lowest-common denominator policies based on the illusory concept of "equality" in the classroom when the emphasis clearly needs to be on teaching that will provide equality of opportunity in the workforce.

GROSSLY inflated Government contracts continue to be awarded on the basis of croneyism, nepotism and, in some instances, what appears to be outright political gangsterism, ensuring the socialist promise of redistribution of wealth has benefited only members of a select magic circle.

A 100-day plan to turn around the tourism industry's fortunes has deteriorated into an ongoing $100 million boondoggle, one that lacks what in military terms would be called an overriding strategic objective and is consequently built around always fluid, improvised tactics held together with cobwebs, stamp hinges and the Minister's increasingly frayed wishful thinking.

Finally, of course, there is the naked grab for consolidating power that is euphemistically passed off as constitutional reform. With no pretence of evenhandedness, without so much as a nod to due process, sections of the Constitution viewed as inconvenient by the current Government are to be ripped out and replaced by pages the Cabinet's policy of censorship-by-omission has prevented Bermudians from scrutinising as yet.

Never mind that votes cast in what's assumed are to be single-seat constituencies will be no more "equal" in value than those in the existing dual-seat constituencies; there will just be fewer of them. Never mind that it is impossible to reconcile what's being billed - straight-faced - as an extension of democracy with what has accurately been called Cabinet's pernicious doctrine of secrecy in this sphere; this covert process of constitutional rewriting, one that upends the traditional checks and balances put into place to prevent precisely such skulduggery, has the bemused consent of Bermuda's nominal constitutional guarantors, the British.

Although the Cabinet Office would obviously prefer to go to the polls under the new, streamlined electoral system it champions, the internal wars and rumours of war involving the Premier's continued leadership may preclude this. These private ructions have twice spilled out into public recently.

Last year there was a narrowly aborted backbench uprising as a result of the Premier's decision to leapfrog her Chief of Staff over the veteran happy warrior Calvin Smith for the Senate leadership. Then two months ago there was an attempted putsch that resulted in a deadlocked vote on her leadership among the PLP's Parliamentarians.

A third such hammer-blow to her prestige delivered by her own MPs would make in all likelihood be fatal.

So it's not entirely surprising that there have been concerted efforts over the last two months to ensure the PLP election war-chest is filled to capacity. What's remarkable is who has been filling it.

Small countries with one-crop economies - and what amount to de facto one-party political systems - that are controlled by foreign capital are routinely defined as banana republics. Bermuda has always escaped such a label in the past because there were two strings to its economic bow, the locally dominated tourism industry and its satellites and the off-shore financial sector.

Today, with tourism a living fossil, it's increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that Bermuda is pioneering a form of post-modern banana republicanism with certain locally-based, foreign-owned concerns playing the role once assigned to the United Fruit Company.

There are major concerns based in Bermuda which subscribe to the view that the business of the island is international business. So they are assiduously cultivating the present political leadership in much the same way the UBP provided mouthpieces for the economic interests of Front Street until it became a largely spent force by the mid-1980s.

THE CEO of one multi-billion-dollar concern, who views himself as a political and corporate king-maker, recently bought himself the bragging rights to being the Premier's new best friend when he pledged to almost single-handedly underwrite the costs of its re-election campaign.

And brag he does. About what this relatively minor business expense will mean for his company's hundreds of work permits, its local tax status, its ability to influence Government decision-making. It goes without saying he did not demonstrate the same largesse to the Opposition when they passed the hat.

The international sector once maintained a policy of strict neutrality vis-a-vis local politics. When campaign contributions were made, they were given to both political parties in equal amounts. Key industry players collectively baulked at a particularly inane Government vanity project, subsidising the purchase price of a multi-million dollar, wedding cake-tiered mansion as the new headquarters for the Tourism Ministry.

Today no such scruples apply. A form of chequebook partisanship is becoming more and more prevalent among interests that have no allegiance to Bermuda other than the three-and-a-half per cent profit margin they gain by doing business here.

It will be interesting to see how if those who remain loyal to the self-styled "People's Premier" can rationalise this transfiguration into the "Top People's" Premier without resorting to armour-plated denial.