Premier Dr. Ewart Brown made it clear on Friday night what his primary mode of political attack — and defence — will be, at least when he is criticised by white politicians.

He will accuse them of racism, no matter how well intentioned their questions and criticisms may be.

That much seems clear from Friday night’s “debate”, in which Dr. Brown responded to questions about fundraising raised the previous week by former Opposition Leader Dr. Grant Gibbons.

The issue Dr. Gibbons raised was justified. Medical consulting firm Kurron Shares of America gave $10,000 to THE (Tourism Helps Everyone) Foundation, an organisation set up by Dr. Brown’s wife to subsidise the Bermuda Music Festival.

Following Dr. Brown’s election as Premier and his appointment of Nelson Bascome as Health Minister, Kurron was established as a partner with the Bermuda Hospitals Board, three years after it conducted a $450,000 review of the hospital and made more than 200 recommendations about its management.

Kurron is now doing an audit on its earlier review to see which of the recommendations have been implemented and will work with the hospital to measure the improvements that have resulted.

It may well be that everything is above board with this. But in the interests of transparency, there needs to full disclosure and it needs to be made clear that donations are not connected to either the grants of contracts, or to ensure that businesses continue to hold contracts.

Questions that need to be answered include whether Kurron’s original contract anticipated the current partnership, what precisely the partnership entails and how much Kurron is being paid.

Was Kurron the only candidate for this partnership, and if so why was it not put out to tender? If there were other candidates, did Bermuda get value for money?

These are relatively straightforward questions, some of which Dr. Gibbons raised last week. He was prevented from going further because Dr. Brown was not in the House of Assembly and could not answer the questions.

Dr. Brown did not answer them on Friday either, except in the sense that he flatly denied any “trickery”.

He defended the establishment of THE Foundation, which he said his wife had founded to help defray the costs of the Bermuda Music Festival because the Tourism Ministry apparently did not have enough money to attract the talent it wanted.

Mrs. Brown arranged for famed soprano Kathleen Battle to give a concert and lined up donors, including Kurron, and sold $1,000 a seat tickets, eventually handing over $110,000 to the promoter of the Music Festival.

Dr. Brown then accused Dr. Gibbons being an “uninformed representative of Bermuda’s racist legacy”, adding he was not a “racist dog” because he was not “a dog”.

Dr. Brown seemed to believe that Dr. Gibbons’ questions stemmed solely from the fact that some of the contributors to the concert were black, and supported politicians who were black because “they see some sort of commonality in their efforts. It does not mean that there is anything tricky going on”.

This statement only makes sense if you know that the chief executive officer of Kurron is black as are the heads of some of the other companies that contributed to THE.

But Dr. Gibbons never raised that point of ownership. The broader issue he did raise is that when a company gives money to an organisation set up by the wife of the man who is now the Premier, then there must be a transparent system of checks and balances in place to ensure nothing “tricky” is going on.

It may well be that this is the case with regard to Kurron. But Dr. Brown needs to say so.

Dr. Brown also said he does not see any need to explain details of the PLP’s fundraising campaign to this newspaper or Dr. Gibbons, and he is technically right, because Bermuda’s campaign finance laws are non-existent, which is an indictment on both political parties.

But Dr. Brown does owe it to the people of Bermuda, whom he has been appointed to lead, to ensure that Bermuda’s finances are handled prudently and wisely, and dismissing those who question him as racist does not provide that guarantee.