Bermuda has never needed a third political party more urgently than now, a one-time supporter of the United Bermuda Party (UBP) said yesterday.

Khalid al Wasi ? also known as Raymond Davis ? said the Island is at a critical crossroads: where it can either "move upwards at unprecedented levels of success and global significance, or slide into a morbidity often a characteristic of underdeveloped nations".

However, he said the prospects of forming a political party other than the Progressive Labour Party (PLP) or UBP could be too risky for all.

"The better option, although most unlikely, would be for the United Bermuda Party to fold," Mr. Wasi said. "Another thought would be that the UBP went through a real reform with some reformers interventions."

In the past, Mr. Wasi was once a staunch UBP supporter, however, seems to be disillusioned by his former party ? yet is no more impressed by the PLP.

Mr. Wasi said the spread of affluence over the last 25 years by the international business sector was mainly spread through the "white elite sector".

"Fortunate for Bermuda, the spin-off was so huge, benefits to the whole Island were unavoidable," he said. "As an example the UBP had two prominent black lawyers, one being the first black Premier and the other a QC, and between them they could not solicit enough business from that booming international business to remain solvent let alone prosper."

But at the same time, Mr. Wasi said, their "white legal contemporaries were building economic empires".

The PLP is unwittingly following the same past as the UBP, he said, but in the "PLP brand of social engineering it gets even thinner at the top".

"The problem being a group and party in power without capital is they are vulnerable as prey to the new-age cash of the multi-nationals," he said.

And Mr. Wasi predicted the space left by Bermuda's "dwindling" middle-class families will be filled by an efficient foreign work-force.

"In hindsight, the Government's prohibition of Bermudians selling their real estate to foreigners may have been in anticipation that there would, at some point, be a rush to do so," he said. "The UBP is so far out of the equation; the populace would rather be robbed blind than to return to their management.

"The situation is so grave; there is no visible leadership among either party that can take the population beyond the social schisms of the 20th Century."

He said the recent rumblings about change of leadership in both parties confirmed both were out-of-touch.

A change of leadership should be held in public, he said, with US-style public political debates.

"It should be the public that endorses their choice," he said. "The UBP in particular cannot afford to mess this one up."

Both political parties were chastised by Mr. Wasi for causing racial strife.

"Racial strife manifest through mechanism of socio-/economic control was most obvious under the UBP Government and now similarly exercised by the PLP Government," he said. "Unlike the UBP with a broad white commercial base where the spread (of wealth) could appear innocuous,the issue of suspicion and limited trust by the PLP exposes them to cronyism as the only alternative."

"Black entrepreneurs today openly state whenever they have a new business idea, they need a well-connected PLP person in order for them to get through," he said,

A final and desperate move to get a third political party may have to operate outside of the Island's local parliamentary process, Mr. Wasi said, as the public could petition Governor Sir John Vereker to show support to rewrite Bermuda's current political contract.