THE overwhelming majority of Bermudians no more look to Throne Speeches for Government agendas than they consult decks of Tarot Cards for career advice or horoscopes to draw up their daily diaries.

If Throne Speeches are remarked on at all the comments generally have less to do with the reliably fanciful contents than the extent of the gridlock caused throughout Hamilton when Front Street is barricaded off for the outdoor ceremony held in the Cabinet Office grounds.

Bermudians have learned from ample experience not to expect much of substance from these annual exercises in Government daydreaming. Enough ostentatious promises have been made in enough bulky Bermuda Throne Speeches since 1968 to paper the entire length of the Great Wall of China. On both sides.

The number of fanciful initiatives floated in these documents that have ever been aggressively pursued by either United Bermuda Party or Progressive Labour Party administrations can be counted on the fingers of one hand. And there are just enough digits left over to give a fully warranted two-finger salute to the politicians responsible for presiding over such institutionalised inertia.

When it comes to the core social issues confronting Bermuda ? education, crime, health, housing and, increasingly, ensuring the elderly do not become economic Displaced Persons in their own island ? neither party has wreathed itself in glory.

Both UBP and PLP Governments have opted to employ words rather than actions to contend with these increasingly critical concerns ? endless torrents of words contained in Throne Speeches that go unread by most everyone except the Governor of the day and which tend to be no more practicable than the antique plumed helmet the poor man's required to sport for the occasion.

Despite weeks of furious tub-thumping to promote the PLP's "Social Agenda", what Bermudians got last Friday was less a plan of action for the coming legislative year than the usual over-hyped cross between a wish list, a creepily ingratiating Valentine card to voters and an advertising campaign quite as deliberately misleading as the Tourism effort to lure visitors to Bermudian beaches that actually exist in Hawaii.

Billed in advance as a decade-long, cross-Ministry initiative to restructure the Bermudian community, the Premier's notion of social engineering turns out to be nothing more or less than a case of political identity theft: the misappropriation of what he presumably believed was a stirring and unsullied term that could camouflage a compost of recycled ideas and programmes behind a seemingly grandiose facade.

As it turns out, his knowledge of what Bermudians require by way of remedial social policies is much akin to his familiarity with discarded and discredited Marxist terminology. As a blueprint for reconditioning Bermuda the Premier and self-appointed Minister of Social Engineering's Throne Speech was about as reliable as the completion dates and budgets he presented for the construction of the senior secondary school as Minister of Engineering.

The Throne Speech's nominal focus on Bermuda's senior citizens, for instance, was hardly more than a cruel joke.

Coming as it did in the same week that residents of an assisted housing project were hit with hundred per cent rent increases and the Premier dismissed the findings of a seniors conference as enough to give him a migraine, the Throne Speech's vague promises to address the concerns of Bermuda's elderly are as likely to be fulfilled as Michael Moore is to find himself an honoured guest at the second Bush Presidential inauguration.

If this Government was as genuinely committed to the concepts of economic empowerment and upward mobility as it claims to be, the reworking of public education would have been the foremost priority in any self-styled programme of social reorganisation.

in 1998 in no small measure because of its uncompromising stance on the entrenched failures of the Education Ministry, the root-and-branch reform programme promised by former Premier Jennifer Smith remains conspicuous by its absence from PLP Throne Speeches.

Bermudian taxpayers support a bloated and overly bureaucratised Education Ministry within which advancement is largely based on either nepotism or croneyism instead of initiative or ability, a self-perpetuating civil service mediocracy rather than a meritocracy. In the Bermuda context, Point Finger Road is now every bit as much identified with conspicuous waste and failure as Enron is in the corporate world.

The Ministry has managed ? or mismanaged ? a precipitous 25-year decline in Bermuda's public school standards while simultaneously drawing on the public purse to the extent that it now costs close to $20,000 per year to educate each student in the public school system. That's more than the fees charged by any of the island's private schools ? and many leading international institutions, for that matter.

What Bermuda gets for this lavish expenditure is an increasingly cretinised secondary school curriculum that, despite its emphasis on enforced egalitarianism rather than scholastic achievement, still only manages to graduate 25 per cent of school leavers every year.

The Bermudian public education system's perverse take on the concept of no child being left behind amounts to systematically handicapping the hard workers and self-starters. Intended to instill a sense of self-worth in less academically gifted children rather than hone the skills of their more intelligent classmates, Bermuda's public school system owes more to once fashionable sociology theories than traditional educational techniques.

The curriculum deliberately downplays competition and individual achievement in favour of a kind of enforced equality based on what amounts to a lowest common denominator model student.

The result is an entirely artificial educational environment in which all students must have prizes regardless of ability, in which neither lessons in core syllabus subjects nor lessons in life are properly learned. A type of equality is presumably achieved by catering to the mediocrities rather than encouraging and fast-tracking the talented ? but at what a price.

results of this experiment in educational equality are school leavers ? graduates and drop-outs both ? who are largely unequal to the task of taking up productive and fulfilling roles in Bermudian society. With the tourism industry now little more than a fading memory among those in the 40-and-over age demographic and the island becoming increasingly reliant on a sophisticated financial services-based economy, the prospects of these uneducated and increasingly unemployable young Bermudians are becoming ever more limited.

The unhappy and probably inescapable consequences of a growing social and economic estrangement between increasingly alienated young Bermudians and the firms and satellite industries that now dominate the island's one-crop financial services economy can be all too easily anticipated.

Bermuda needs to urgently address the systemic failures of a public education system that is cold-shouldering the needs of Bermudians and endangering the future prospects of an economy that requires social stability and a literate, numerate workforce if it is to continue its steady upwards spiral.

A serious, sober-minded Government policy paper on wholesale educational reform would actually lay the groundwork for a social engineering project that even the Premier's most conservative critics could support as both necessary and long overdue.