"You say you got a real solution/Well, you know/We'd all love to see the plan/You ask me for a contribution/Well, you know/We're doing what we can/But when you want money/For people with minds that hate/All I can tell is brother you have to wait." - Lennon/McCartney, Revolution

"International big business has made revolutions before to safeguard its interests. Or strangled them in their cribs for the same reason ¿ Your international financier needs good luck, and if Fate is a little forgetful, then Fate's elbow must be jogged ¿ The elbow-jogger-in-chief is an important man. He knows the very best people. He is a polite fellow with a beautiful wife and an income reported to come from the choicest securities. But he also knows the dangerous class, the politicians and political hangers-on ¿ He himself has no political convictions. For him there is no other nexus between man and man but naked self-interest." - Eric Ambler

"Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer- except, of course, for the pigs" - George Orwell, Animal Farm

THIS election campaign is turning into an extended visit to a funeral parlour. An old friend is laid out in an open casket. The body has been rouged and waxed. The fingernails pared and polished. The hair washed and barbered. And the deceased is kitted out in top-flight finery.

In fact all of this posthumous jiggery-pokery has created the terrible illusion that the loved one is still very much in the very pink of health and is simply napping in the most exotic choice of loungers.

But it's a short-lived illusion. The fact is the body is dead. Life is extinct and is no more coming back than bell-bottom jeans or Jheri curls or Jimmy Hoffa. This whole protracted and sad ritual is in fact an act of remembrance for credibility, not a celebration of its ongoing presence and vitality in Bermudian affairs.

Despite the best efforts of some in this Government to suggest otherwise, Bermuda is no longer an island of shopkeepers. It hasn't been for the best part of 20 years. Rather it's an island of landlords - landlords for the operators of what amounts to a latterday entrepot. This is a freeport where unimaginable amounts of money are warehoused in what amounts to a 21-square-mile tax-free zone.

The money belongs to our off-shore industries, of course, not to Bermudians. But just enough is thrown in our general direction - for rents, for grocery bills, for all manner of support services - to prevent us from noticing the chasm-like, Third World-style income disparities that now separate the Have Nots from the Have Lots in Bermuda. Or perhaps to ensure we avert our eyes from what's becoming an increasingly untenable situation.

The off-shore sector is, in the main, made up of companies and individuals that fit the public's perception of what "Good Corporate Citizens" should be. Government, of course, has an entirely different definition of this term, one based on how much these firms ante up when the collection plate is passed for the party warchests, inaugural galas and other influence-buying gambits. Like election campaigns.

It's no secret that a handful of well-heeled individuals who view themselves as power brokers in the Bermudian socio-political context have been throwing money at both political parties, the chief reason neither the Progressive Labour nor the United Bermuda Party will even countenance the idea of campaign finance reform.

What these wealthy-beyond-the-dreams-of-avarice contributors hope to purchase for their donations is self-evident: Bermuda - or, more to the point, the Bermuda they operate in. Which is not the same Bermuda that most of the rest of us have to try and survive in. Rather it's the one that has no Government restrictions on how rapidly their industries are allowed to grow. It's the Bermuda that will continue granting work permits by the gross despite the strains this is placing on both our resources and our infrastructure (all this silly talk of Workplace Equity legislation being just so much vote-winning flummery to be used on the campaign trail). And it's the Bermuda that will not even think about tinkering with a penal and antideluvian import-based tax system that costs those least able to pay far more of their pay cheques in proportionate terms than it does those who are better financially placed to take up some of the burden.

Make no mistake about it, people, there is nothing in the least bit altruistic about Bermudian politics anymore.

There are no grand crusades either underway or being planned. There are no idealistic campaigns being crafted to empower the traditionally powerless. There is, however, abundant evidence to demonstrate that Bermudian politics is following the dictates of what has accurately been described as the Iron Law of Oligarchy. To the very letter.

In other words, nothing has really changed at all when it comes to the leaders and the led, the herders and the herded. The last decade has not seen the emergence of a "New" Bermuda - at least not in the sense most Bermudians had anticipated. What has emerged, though, is a new Bermuda elite, a new set of rulers to preside over the ruled. A self-seeking and self-serving elite that isn't above plundering the finances of the Bermuda Housing Corporation, an institution that exists to cater to the most vulnerable in our community, certainly isn't beyond accepting contributions from our well-heeled residents in return for giving favourable consideration to their business plans.

Government is attempting to camouflage this inconvenient fact by opting to bypass the typically mindless bread-and-circuses-type election campaign the UBP is depending on this time out with what might best be termed an electoral exercise in "dread and circuses". But resuscitating ancient tribal feuds, reviving even the most demented and entirely fantastic racial blood libels, will do nothing to disguise the reality that Bermuda is now more riven by class and income differences than racial ones. Not in the long term.

You would have to be half-made to argue that the legacy of racism and racial segregation does not have an continuing impact on Bermuda's social and economic dynamics. However, you would actually have to be hooked up to a Thorazine drip (as is evidently the case with some Bermudian politicians and more than a few of their overly-fervent hangers-on) to deny the equally obvious fact that mounting income disparities have fuelled runaway internal inflation - the pursuit of too few resources by too much money - and atomised the old social structure of this island. Overheated economic development has proved to be extremely destructive to Bermudian institutions, to our traditions, to the community as a whole - and especially to individuals whose long-established cultural frames of reference have been obliterated in recent years. The ideas of community and the commonalities that once bound this community together have been entirely superseded by the demands of the New Economy, that most conspicuous manifestation of the New Bermuda. And the common good is increasingly ignored in favour of a single, particular good - the good of our off-shore financial services companies and their employees.

Barring an increasingly unlikely Lazarus-style recovery, it seems that along with political credibility Bermudians will be laying a now-dying social system - an entire way of life - to rest in the not-so distant future.