OW he's waxing apocalyptic. The Premier has taken to employing the creepy dogmatism of a street-corner preacher in his single-minded pursuit of Independence. He's proselytising for sovereignty on the basis it will bring about the sort of comprehensive secular transformation in Bermudian society St. John's revelations prophesise on a divine scale. It amounts to the "New" Bermuda by way of the New Jerusalem, with P. as a low-rent seer providing the dodgy roadmap to what he says is Utopia.

It's nonsense, of course. But perhaps this sharp veer into quasi-mysticism was only to be expected. Demonstrating no discernible sense of either proportion or irony, the Premier actually described himself a "prophet without honour" in his first meeting with the Bermuda Independence Commission.

Given the public has long since rejected that body's Dead On Arrival final report and the accompanying propaganda intended to sledge-hammer them into accepting its findings, his appeals have, by necessity, shifted from the BIC's misleading but largely fact-based data to entirely intangible arguments.

The BIC may have taken selectively chosen irrelevant and largely unrelated facts to buttress its predetermined conclusions on Independence; the Premier has dispensed with facts altogether. The attainment of Independence, says the Premier with messianic assurance, will banish all ills and establish a just society.

His mind is so fixed on this illusory future that he actually seems to be blind to the causes of the ongoing social injustices he says sovereignty will miraculously remedy. He is also oblivious to the fact he is in even now in a position to address these self-same issues with programmes and policies that might actually be more practical and effective than his preferred all-purpose solution of Independence. Indeed, the specifics of how a new flag and the newly expanded bureaucracy Independence will necessitate are going to usher in a Golden Age are conspicuous by their complete absence from his arguments. For Bermuda's Premier, Independence is now an entirely faith-based initiative.

A case in point. Recently a group of teenage beauty pageant contestants visited the Cabinet Office. Support my Independence campaign, the Premier implored them at a grip-and-grin photo session that unexpectedly segued into an End Times revival meeting.

Without Independence you will never get good jobs, P. thundered.

Without Independence you will be second-class citizens.

He might as well have added that without Independence you will be doomed to be eaten by a seven-headed, ten-horned expatriate dragon.

The episode was as pathetic as it was borderline psychedelic. And it's not even as if the Premier and his partisans could, by way of mitigation, argue he was motivated by genuine if misguided idealism. For the spirit of idealistic dedication so much in evidence when the Progressive Labour Party first took office eight years ago has long since disappeared. The dynamic energy ? the sense of possibility - has dissipated, leaving only the boundless vacuum that is Alex Scott's political judgement.

In place of idealism, there is today the type of cynical self-aggrandisement which deems Independence to be its ultimate objective. In place of bold thinking, there is either drab conformity or complete inertia. In place of a coherent vision for the future, there is only the championing of an obsolete nationalist creed from the past.

strident, race-based strain of nationalism is one that peaked in popularity in this part of the world in the early 1970s. Jamaica, Barbados and the Bahamas have all long since abandoned what used to be called Third World Socialism ? which substituted agitation between different and supposedly irreconcilable racial and ethnic blocs for the class warfare propounded in mainstream socialism.

Those countries all eventually recognised that enshrining the subversion of the Fourth Commandment as the official state policy was of extremely limited utility when it came to stable governance in racially mixed or caste-ridden societies. In Bermuda, though, it remains the cornerstone of this Premier's thinking although it is of as little practical application to a Bermuda that's economically integrated into a globalised 21st century as, say, the grubby, battle-fatigued authoritarianism of Fidel Castro, another icon of the Bermudian left in the late 1960s/early 1970s. But then P., something of a political grave-robber when it comes to these things, has also disinterred the political relic that is Communist Cuba in a move some consider to be a dry-run for the type of foreign policy he would pursue at Independence.

Nationalism of the type espoused by the Premier is, simply put, a dead religion for a growing number of Bermudians. That's why, despite the evangelical zeal he manifests for Independence, he has only managed to attract the sort of following worthy of a fringe cult.

The reality is that Bermudians are increasingly dissatisfied with their present circumstances and wary about their futures. Almost 60 per cent of them, according to the most recent poll, are unhappy with the direction Bermuda is moving in. They are hardly about to empower the Government they hold responsible for current conditions to lead them into the uncharted territory of Independence.

While the Premier continues to issue extravagant promissory notes on the supposed benefits of Independence, the public increasingly believes they can never be redeemed. He has too often spoken and acted in bad faith in the past for them to take him at his word about an unknown and, ultimately, unknowable future; he inspires not confidence but rather scepticism, frustration and a growing sense of dismay.

Statistical and anecdotal evidence demonstrates more than two-thirds of Bermudians are not interested in sovereignty at this juncture.

Rather, this same statistical and anecdotal evidence demonstrates they are concerned with a public education system that fails to equip school leavers with even the most fundamental skills required to succeed in Bermuda's economy.

They are concerned with drug-trafficking gangs and gang-adjunct crimes ? including shootings ? that result from Bermuda's growing surplus of the uneducated and unemployable being absorbed into the criminal milieu.

They are concerned with their continuing ability to survive in a bifurcated economy in which million dollar starter homes are the perverse norm, a situation that helps fuel epidemic alcohol and drug abuse that the desperate view as the only sane reaction to an insanely overheated economic environment they are excluded from. And this widespread demand for drugs, of course, only further empowers Bermuda's growing number of increasingly rootless and ruthless gangsters in what's becoming a vicious ? and potentially unbreakable ? cycle of social despair.

According to P., only Independence is capable of reversing such despondency and social dislocation.

He doesn't countenance, for instance, anything so logical as upgrading a failed public school curriculum, improving teaching standards or ratcheting up classroom discipline. Fully half of Bermuda's public school students are failing. Even those who emerge with paper qualifications are either undereducated or miseducated. The fact the Bermuda College has had to lower entrance standards ? and equally quietly introduce remedial classes in reading and basic English comprehension ? points to the fact public school students are increasingly disconnected from educations that stimulate critical thought and position them to aspire to higher specialisation at the university level.

of Bermuda's private schools attend some of the best universities in the world and come back to the island mentally and socially equipped to take up positions in the new economy; public school leavers, in the main, are doomed to eking out existences on the margins of this cash-flush economy despite the fact what Government spends on them per head far exceeds the highest fees charged by any private school on the island.

The reality is that the Progressive Labour Party won the last General Election by a margin somewhat narrower than Colonel David Burch's mind. Since his bizarre ascension following the post-election ouster of Jennifer Smith, the Accidental Premier's only real achievement has been to lower expectations about his performance so very far that if he makes it through the rest of his term without accidentally text messaging another racially inflammatory note to the chairman of CURE, he'll probably get a knighthood. But he's unlikely to lengthen the odds on a repeat PLP victory at the next General Election.

By so obstinately steering against the current of public opinion, P.'s likely to end up not only a prophet without honour but also one without a job.