iven that Dr. Brown is so fond of renaming Government agencies, he might as well make it official and make the Department of Immigration the Department of Intimidation. The deportation of the Elbow Beach chef and revocation of construction site manager Curtis Macleod's work permit confirm that the change is warranted; intimidation is the name of the game in the third attempt at a New Bermuda. I suppose we should have seen this coming. We weren't promised a better Bermuda, just a new one.

As every day passes it's clear that the New Bermuda is a rollback to an era that most of us hoped we'd progressed past, a time when overt racial antagonism and nationalistic incitement ruled the day.

Today, anyone who refuses to worship at the PLP altar will be deported as a first option, alternatively attempts will be made to silence them with racist dogs, shysters, House n**gers or Uncle Tom's slurs.

What remains is a select group of those racially authentic Bermudians apparently permitted to speak in this community. The rest of us ? and that would be most of us ? should just shut up and go home, even if this is home.

The launching pad for this campaign of intimidation was Dr. Brown's "racist dog" attack in Parliament; an event which emboldened and authorised his sidekicks' exercises in intimidation and abuses of power.

First the Elbow Beach chef was deported for a joke; then Dr. Wakely of the Medical Clinic was fired for advocating for her patients instead of sending them off to private clinics (of which Dr. Brown just so happens to own one); and now it's Canadian construction worker Mr. Macleod who failed to kowtow to George Scott, opting instead to offer a character assessment of Mr. Scott that is impressive in its all encompassing brevity: "?you racist, uneducated, ignorant a**hole".

Maybe it's me, but on a construction site I thought those kinds of comments were terms of endearment? I guess not.

But yet again, as with everything in Bermuda, ego, race and a resurgent nativism are the root of the dispute with Mr. Scott who allegedly demanded respect because he's an MP, while racially taunting Mr. Macleod with this statement:

"You are not from here and you don't know what it is like to be a black man. You are a black man with a white man's heart."

I suppose we should thank Mr. Scott for his own all encompassing brevity, capturing Bermuda's debilitating political problem in two short sentences.

The optimists among us might be willing to dismiss these events as background noise ? personal disputes that have bubbled over into the political domain ? however the incendiary diatribe that was infused into the budget speech confirms that intimidation is now official public policy.

Finance Minister Cox, perhaps uncharacteristically for many people, inserted conclusions drawn from the CURE report into the 2007 Budget speech, cavalierly labelling our business community as racist, lacking "good faith" in their hiring practices, doing Bermuda harm and "profiteering" at Bermudians' ? particularly black Bermudians' ? expense.

Where to start? How's about with what the CURE stats do and do not tell us? The CURE statistics identify issues, not explain why they exist; it's up to others to diagnose the cause. Ms Cox, an intelligent and educated individual who is more than capable of connecting the dots, didn't diagnose the cause, she obscured it.

Her highly provocative diatribe ignores a major reason for the poor representation of black Bermudians in "the upper echelons of the private sector workplace": Public education.

Just weeks ago Ms Cox's colleague, the Minister of Education, declared in solemn tones that the (disproportionately black) public education system's graduation rates made for "grim reading", that over half of our students are failing to complete a second rate diploma and that the Terra Nova test results revealed severe underperformance with our US counterparts (a system that underperforms itself). This Government has even gone so far as to label young black men as "a problem", yet professes astonishment that we don't have more black CEOs.

If Ms Cox and her colleagues had a shred of intellectual honesty they would draw the connection between the CURE results and the performance of the public education system which they've submitted to an independent inquiry. Politically that doesn't play as well as attempting to shift the blame on the business community.

The poor representation of Bermudians ? black Bermudians in particular ? in senior business posts is an entirely predictable result of a public education system in disarray, not proof of institutional racism.

That statement doesn't deny the disparities between Bermudian and non-Bermudian, black and white and all of the cross sections of those categories, but honestly acknowledges one of the major drivers of this phenomenon.

Unless and until we produce students sufficiently educated to steward the assets of multi-billion dollar international corporations, no business would ? or should ? engage in social promotion to placate politicians who've sat on their hands for the past decade rather than start tackling the problem.

Simply put, the public education system's continued dismal performance masks the extent of institutional racism in Bermuda and contributes to the racial disparity in senior executive positions.

In fact, it's the business community that has been ringing the education alarm far longer than the PLP Government ? which found religion only weeks ago ? preferring to spend the majority of their past two terms deriding anyone and everyone ? including myself ? who dare state what they've now acknowledged.

This decades old political strategy of racially dividing and conquering has run its course. The endless racial antagonism, xenophobic nativism and endless tests of racial authenticity serve no-one other than a clique of egotistical, thin-skinned and self-serving politicians.