I must say I really enjoyed reading a well written, very interesting article by Alvin Williams published in the Mid-Ocean News of June 26th 2009. The article was headlined "Premier's actions have struck a blow for liberty". Actually the article was so much more than that for it revealed England's tendency for duplicity when dealing with her oldest, existing colony.

However, what intrigued me most was Mr. Williams' revelation that it was highly unlikely that Britain knew nothing about what occurred between America and Bermuda since there had been many instances in the past that England and the United States had made decisions about Bermuda without the participation of Bermudians.

Of course the English would respond to such a charge with the statement, that as long as Bermuda was a colony, the British Government did not have to inform Bermudians about decisions they take involving Bermuda. And during our colonial history, there have been many instances of England making decisions involving Bermuda without Bermuda's participation.

A grand example of these high-handed decisions by England was the Lend Lease agreement negotiated between England and the United States at the outset of the Second World War. According to the Wikipedia Encyclopedia:

"In 1941, the US signed a lend-lease agreement with the UK giving the British surplus US Navy destroyers in exchange for 99-year lease rights to establish naval and airbases" in Bermuda. The bases consisted of 5.8 square kilometres (2.25 sq. mi.) of land largely reclaimed from the sea.

"The US Naval Air Station was on St. David's Island, while the US Naval Air Station Annex was at the western end of the island in the Great Sound. Both bases were closed in September 1995 (as were British and Canadian bases), and the lands were formally returned to the Government of Bermuda in 2002."

As a result of the closure of the US and other bases, Bermuda got a modern airport at St. David's, a movie theatre and several buildings that could be used for low cost housing. However, there were several buildings that were allowed to run down and become dilapidated. Bermudians still wonder why the UBP and PLP governments of the day did not make much better use of buildings which could have been used to help resolve Bermuda's ongoing problem with respect to the provision of low-cost housing.

To their eternal shame, England and Bermuda missed an excellent opportunity to alleviate the plight of Bermuda's homeless with little or no cost to either country.

There are many other cases for which England could have intervened in Bermuda's affairs to correct a social or economic imbalance but did not do so because they believed that such action would have caused discomfort to the resident white population. One such incident worth mentioning was the integration of schools.

When Dr. E. F. Gordon campaigned to integrate Bermuda's school system, he was concerned about the lack of sufficient secondary schools to educate Bermuda's black school-aged population. This situation was compounded by the fact that the black school aged population was twice the size of the white school age population although significantly less educational plant was assigned to black development.

Dr. Gordon's heroic effort to integrate Bermuda's school system had as its goal greatly increased educational opportunities for Bermudian children at the lower income levels. Because economic opportunities for Bermuda's black majority had been greatly restricted by slavery followed by decades of segregation, it was no surprise that blacks dominated the population of the so-called lower income groups.

However, Dr. Gordon recognised that one way to correct this imbalance was by making certain that educational opportunities for young Bermudians were not restricted because of income. He therefore pioneered the ideal of free education in Primary schools. Later on, the notion of free education was adopted by all government schools, both primary and secondary. The point is that England did not interfere to enforce the notion of free education because they were not prepared to do anything that would restrict the powers of their Bermudian descendants to govern Bermuda as they desired.

England's readiness to protect Bermuda's white population knew no bounds. As evidence, one needs only to recall the events of early 1965 when the Bermuda Industrial Union was attempting to organise The Bermuda Electric Light Company (BELCO) by picketing the organisation. On February 2nd 1965, the British authorities decided to break up the strike by sending in the Police to stop the picketing.

However, the efforts of the Bermuda Police Force only served to turn the peaceful picketing into a full scale civil disturbance between the picketers and the Bermuda Police. Subsequently, several picketers were arrested and at least one Policeman was seriously though not fatally wounded.

As a result of the civil disturbances, the English took positive action on behalf of the people of Bermuda. This was not surprising since the riots received attention all over the world and Bermuda received unfavourable publicity as one of the few remaining British dependencies where racial privilege for whites was exceeded only by The Republic of South Africa.

Still, England by way of apology could claim that not even the independent countries of the Caribbean or, for that matter, the rest of the world, could match Bermuda in terms of its well-managed economy and generally high standard of living.

The behaviour of England towards the citizens of its oldest colony was clearly racist. For England not only saw a need to protect Bermudians of English origin who were born in Bermuda but also several thousand white persons who were not born in Bermuda and who at that time numbered 12,100 or almost a quarter of the total de-facto population, of 52,300.

However, let us be clear that the relatively few black newcomers, mainly from the Caribbean (roughly 1,500), were simply lumped together with their black cousins and similarly ignored.

Obviously, England has never left any doubt that it did not see the black inhabitants of their colonies in the same light as those of European descent. When the English colonials in Northern Rhodesia — now Zimbabwe — made a universal declaration of independence against England rather than submit to rule by Africans — as had been ordered by England — the English made it very clear that they had no intention of restoring the country by force with the world famous statement by Mr. Harold Wilson, (the English Prime Minister at the time), "I have no intention of sending British troops to fight "Kith and Kin'."

This tendency of the Mother Country to side with 'Kith and Kin' in a dispute within a colony no matter the origin of the dispute has been evidenced many times in former colonies even when the dispute does not impinge upon what England considers her national interests.

Some people call England's behaviour as its new found racism. I would question the term "New found racism", since England has intervened in Bermuda's affairs throughout its history but never to protect or advance the rights of Black Bermudians.

Hence, it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that the hostile behaviour of imperial England towards Bermuda, because it chose to provide a home for four displaced Chinese, amounted to little more than England's insistence on ruling Bermuda on the basis of an outdated, racist, colonial ideology.

Surely a colony of England which governs without assistance from Mother England, either financially or administratively, deserves much better treatment.

calvin@northrock.bm