Opposition Leader Grant Gibbons lashed the Government on education in his reply to the Throne Speech yesterday, saying the system was now segregated on class instead of race.

The United Bermuda Party leader said Bermuda?s dual education system, where the poor used failing public schools while the rich went private, was creating an underclass shut out from top jobs.

He said: ?The negative impact is felt in a very personal and disturbing way by young Bermudians who apply for jobs and get turned down for lack of basic skills.

?They see good jobs in our main service industries go to foreign workers and wonder why. They feel alienated from their community and they don?t understand it.?

He said his party would ensure there was a licensed teacher in every classroom, internationally recognised tests and monitoring and reporting on school performances.

The UBP also wants to create a hospitality industry and trade division within the Ministry of Education, establish a national apprentice programme at Bermuda College and set up a tax incentive program for companies hiring and training apprentices locally.

Government had been far too late in its housing policy after promising work would begin on 330 homes when they should have been built by now, said Dr. Gibbons.

?Even their mobile emergency homes are homeless, sitting unoccupied in a government quarry.?

Tourism was still failing, said Dr. Gibbons, with 2005 monthly hotel occupancy rates below 2004 levels for every month except April. He again called for Government to hand over the running of the industry to a Tourism authority.

Dr. Gibbons said the public were confused on which formula the Government would choose for deciding the issue of Independence which was being dragged out with no timetable in sight.

On race he said the Government had pledged to set up a committee to eliminate racism at the same time as leading a bad example by throwing racial taunts at the UBP whose members have been described as ?suntanned?, ?a maid servant to the white master? and a ?black buffoon.?

His party had shown the way said Dr. Gibbons by embracing diversity and pushing for widening economic opportunity by awarding 20 percent of Government spending to small businesses.

He said the PLP Government?s Throne Speech pledge to have an economic empowerment zone had been put forward by the UBP in 1998.

The PLP had been elected with the promise of rekindling hope but were now alienating even their own supporters, said Dr. Gibbons.

?But hope disappeared somewhere between the BHC and Berkeley fiascos on the road to pay-to-play.

?And the PLP government has become everything they said they once fought against: vengeful, self-serving and seriously out of touch with the people.?

Premier Alex Scott voiced his concern for those left out of Bermuda?s booming economy yesterday.

He said successful economies could sometimes be as devastating as unsuccessful economies on certain sectors of society.

And he said a study on the plight of the young black male had already thrown up problems of institutionalised racism including one man who had worked in Government setting up the infrastructure for the reinsurance sector only to be shunned by the private sector despite his wealth of experience.

?This individual was finally frustrated out of the financial sector and out of the Bermuda.

?What happens to the young black man who doesn?t have the benefit of qualifications, education and training in the financial sector??

Mr. Scott said the nuclear family was increasingly a thing of the past with single parents bringing up children on incomes of $20-30,000 a year while the nuclear family was topping six figures.

It was time to look at a poverty line to assess the problem, said the Premier.