?We normally don?t discuss our members with anybody,? says Scott Simmons, PLP spokesman, when asked how many white people are members of the Progressive Labour Party.

It seems a fair enough question; political parties often track the ethnicity or race of their membership, just as they record details of age and gender. In Bermuda, where employers fill in forms stating their workers? race, it seems reasonable to assume the ruling party will ask its own members the same question.

Mr. Simmons won?t really say if that?s the case or not. ?I think anybody would want to know who their membership are,? he states.

?Any political party would have an idea.?

But he adds: ?We don?t have those kind of conversations and nobody asks those kind of things.?

Mr. Simmons agrees to call The Royal Gazette back for a chat about the issues surrounding race and the PLP.

He never does, despite a series of messages being left on his cell phone over the next few days. Perhaps he just doesn?t want to have that ?kind of conversation?.

His leader, thankfully, is more forthcoming.

Premier Alex Scott says that the PLP doesn?t give out details of membership because: ?I think folks still are cautious given what some feel has been political victimisation over the years.?

He adds: ?I can say that we do have white members, active, supportive.?

He says that while it?s obvious that whites are in a minority in the party, the numbers are ?not unlike the demographic of the voting patterns?.

Not everyone agrees with that. A former member of the party says he?d be surprised if the PLP had 20 white members.

How many white people actually are in the party remains a mystery, though on the surface, at least, it appears to be very few.

A newcomer to the Island probably wouldn?t be able to spot too many real political differences between the PLP and its opposite number in the House of Assembly, the United Bermuda Party (UBP).

Yet at a UBP ?celebration? attended by hundreds of people in March, the audience at the Southampton Fairmont was a real mix of black and white.

The UBP says it does not track its members on race but a Shadow Minister guesses the membership is about 70 percent white and 30 percent black.

It may be that the figures for the PLP are similar, in reverse, but it?s hard to measure, except anecdotally.

At PLP meetings there are rarely more than a scattering of white faces.

And in Parliament, the racial make-up of the party seems obvious enough. Its movers and shakers all appear to be black, though that wasn?t always the case.

Englishwoman Dorothy Thompson, one of the six MPs elected to the House of Assembly after the party was formed in 1963, was white.

Local author and race activist Dr. Eva Hodgson says Mrs. Thompson was chosen over a black candidate because the party was ?so anxious to prove that they were open to white people?.

?It was a terribly hurtful thing,? she says. ?But the PLP wanted to make this strong statement.?

Union activist Dr. Barbara Ball was another prominent white party member. Alvin Williams wrote in the Mid-Ocean News in 2002 of the fate that befell Dr. Ball when she took up the cause of largely black Bermudian labour movement: ?Namely, being ostracised by the white community.?

The PLP?s first Tourism Minister was a white man ? David Allen ? who joined the party in 1967. The PLP Founders Day Commemorative Journal, published in 2004, described him as a ?key component of the PLP leadership team? before his death in 2002.

So if, as Mr. Williams wrote in the same article, ?Bermuda has made some progress in the area of race relations? since Dr. Ball?s day, why does the PLP appear less integrated than ever?

For the Premier, the reason is simple: ?Whites have been ostracised by being associated with the PLP.

?That sends a message ? don?t be found to be visibly associated with the PLP.?

He reveals that the Government works with white people who even now are wary of being publicly linked to the party.

?They still are cautious,? he says. ?I don?t think there needs to be fear now.

?There is an irony involved. As long as folks are apprehensive and cautious about being in the PLP there are those who will intimidate them.

?It becomes a political ploy of the past by those who try and turn people away from the PLP.

?The legacy of racism is still in Bermuda. We haven?t been able to free ourselves of the traditions of our recent past.?

Michael Markham, a white member who joined the PLP in the 1990s, partly concurs with that view.

He admits that he has been reluctant to publicly proclaim his membership of the party, though he can?t quite explain why.

?Most people don?t even know I?m a member of the Progressive Labour Party,? he says. ?This is the first time I have ever publicly said something to anybody.

?I spend a lot of time with black people and you know what, some white friends have no problem with it and other white friends won?t even talk to me about it anymore.?

But he also believes that the party leadership has failed to tackle the race issue head-on.

The 61-year-old father-of-six, of Knapton Hill, says: ?There is a faction within the PLP that I believe doesn?t want to have anything to do with white people. They only tolerate me.?

He can?t quite put his finger on what makes him feel like that; he says it?s just a sense he gets from time to time.

?Within the party I?m accepted by a lot of people but there are some people that don?t accept me within the party because I?m white.?

Mr. Markham, who is independently wealthy and says he has never worked in Bermuda, claims he helped steer the party to victory in 1998, along with Reece Furbert of multi-media company RF Communications.

He says they did ?a whole campaign for the PLP in 1998 and we won the election?.

He joined the party at the end of the campaign but says it was ?very difficult? and still is.

That difficulty, he claims, comes from inside and outside the party.

?I was edited out of the pictures,? he says. ?Even the people in the party didn?t want to admit there was a white person helping them. There are a whole bunch of dynamics going on there.?

He says he was ?welcomed by some people, by others, no?.

Today he feels much the same way, claiming that high-ranking members of the party, including cabinet ministers, have treated him with hostility.

?It?s hard to determine why,? he admits. ?For me it?s a personal thing because I sometimes don?t know whether I?m being discriminated against because of my colour or the fact that I wasn?t born here.?

But he firmly believes the PLP is not reaching white Bermudians and that things need to change.

?Racism in the PLP is a major issue,? he says. ?Unless the PLP overcomes the race issue it won?t be able to govern properly in the country.

?It?s imperative for the PLP to have good relations with the white community. I am not a white Bermudian but white Bermudians view the PLP with trepidation.?

It could so easily have been the same for Mr. Markham. He had barely met a black person before he came to Bermuda and once he arrived from England as a youth his experience was one of almost total segregation.

He was a teenage member of the Mid-Ocean Club and remembers being specifically told by that he was ?under no circumstances to bring any Jews, any black people or any Portuguese, in that order? to the venue.

His first real experience of black people was as a young man at the Church of the Nazarene in Collectors Hill, where fellow congregation members would invite him home for dinner. ?They were very kind to me and loving,? he recalls.

Later, he met Neletha Butterfield, now the Environment Minister, when they founded the Board of Prison Fellowship in the 1980s.

He says his friendship with her and his opposition to the Stubbs Bill of 1994, which legalised homosexuality for men and which was opposed by some members of the PLP, led him to the party.

He says he has rarely seen other white people at PLP events and feels he is ?not normal?.

But he adds: ?I would like to see more white people in the PLP, absolutely. And that?s a question that has not been addressed by the leadership.

?It?s a black party and they have to empower white people if they want them in their party. They have to find a way to have political partnership on some sort of equal basis.

?They have to find a way to share some of that power on an equal basis if they want to totally be a representative party, representing whites, blacks and Portuguese.?

Despite his frustrations with aspects of his party, Mr. Markham remains loyal and proud of its achievements since coming to power.

?When we first took government in 1998, one of the political strategies that I was pressing for was to reach out to the white community.

?One of the reasons that I?m still a member of the PLP is because I still believe there are people who made that promise who are still in that party.

?The PLP needs a coherent entry level policy to bring in new members of the white and Portuguese community. If we can actually start dealing with some of that, I?m very much an optimist about the future of Bermuda.?

* See tomorrow?s edition of The Royal Gazette for part two of Whites in the PLP.