Many will probably be surprised to hear that the first PLP government's maiden Throne Speech in 1998 — delivered by the Premier, Jennifer Smith, after their historic victory over the United Bermuda Party — was entitled “One Bermuda”.

In 2026, amid leadership convulsions and insider-driven party mechanics within today's “One Bermuda Alliance”, this earlier PLP inheritance can sound like an artefact from a more hopeful time. It wasn't. It was a public provocation — an insistence that Bermuda's future could not be permanently organised around “us” and “them.”

To understand why “One Bermuda” could sit at the centre of that Throne Speech in 1998, you have to return to the grassroots pressure of the 1990s — a widening popular sovereignty consciousness, led by younger Bermudians coming of age politically and refusing to inherit the island's divisions as destiny.

That consciousness was shaped by everyday realities — unequal access, closed networks — and by the world: the 1990s were a decade when history felt moveable. Britain's return of Hong Kong in 1997 reminded small jurisdictions that constitutional arrangements are not sacred objects; they are political choices.

In Bermuda, this sharpened a question young voters were already asking: who actually holds authority here — the parties, the elites or the people?

That is the soil in which “One Bermuda” grew. Not as harmony, but as a stubborn idea: the end of “otherness” as our organising principle. One Bermuda as a speed bump in the road of adversarial politics — forcing every driver to slow down and confront what it would mean to govern without a permanent enemy.

The momentum of the 1990s compelled leaders such as Jennifer Smith to borrow its vocabulary.

“One Bermuda” did not originate in Cabinet; it was pulled upward by pressure below. A generational handoff: civil-rights-era struggle giving way to postcolonial reform — less willing to accept inherited party scripts, more willing to question the architecture itself.

The later dominance of “two Bermudas” in the rhetoric of today's PLP leadership is a retreat to their traditional comfort zone. Whatever descriptive power it has, it easily becomes an identity trap: politics that depends on division for energy and cannot plausibly transcend it.

“One Bermuda”, by contrast, is expensive. It demands citizens who will think independently, associate freely, and hold power accountable regardless of which colour is on the platform.

The 1995 independence referendum sits in this story like an exposed nerve. The 59 per cent turnout and decisive 74 per cent “No” revealed public distrust of top-down constitutional theatre.

The PLP’s boycott read to many as refusal to engage democratically on the largest question a people can face. It raised doubts about political maturity and whether party strategy was being placed above popular sovereignty.

By 1998, UBP chaos opened the door: the PLP won 26 of 40 seats with 54 per cent of the vote, ending three decades of dominance. But here is the irony: the PLP's most unifying inheritance — “One Bermuda” — became the standard by which later years would judge them, and find them wanting.

Unity was always a radical demand; they gradually substituted it with division-management. By 2003, even the UBP echoed the phrase, which is less conversion than public hunger. Big ideas survive party turnover because they are not party property. They haunt all sides.

Later formations styled themselves as movements and alliances — OBA, BDA, FDM — rather than “parties”. Whatever one thinks of their programmes, the naming hints at a persistent difficulty: the mismatch between a citizenry wanting accountability and co-operation and political machinery designed for survival and control.

In 2026, as Bermuda revisits electoral reform and good governance, “One Bermuda” remains radical because it refuses the conveniences of divided politics. It refuses permanent antagonism and the idea that sovereignty means choosing which elite group manages your life.

Episodes such as the OBA's leadership turbulence matter beyond gossip: they show how quickly “the people's voice” narrows into “the insiders' decision”. This returns us to the 1990s youth consciousness that forced “One Bermuda” into a Throne Speech: the insistence that legitimacy comes from below, and that citizens must behave like citizens, not clients.

The deepest truth of “One Bermuda” is that it cannot be delivered by leaders as a gift or secured by one election. It must be claimed — repeatedly — by an electorate willing to do the hard work of popular sovereignty: independent thought, free association, and relentless accountability of whichever government holds office.

That is why the phrase persists like a speed bump in our political landscape. Every time politics accelerates into familiar division, “One Bermuda” sits there — unmoved — forcing a moment of reckoning: are we building a country or merely rotating control?

“One Bermuda” is bigger than any party or alliance, older than any current dispute. It is a grassroots demand that rose with the 1990s youth vote — a generation who glimpsed that Bermuda could be more than a managed quarrel.

The radical horizon it points to is not harmony-by-decree, but sovereignty-in-practice: a Bermuda that becomes one through the civic courage of its people, not the choreography of its parties.

• Corin Smith is a member of the Emperial Group