Independence is so discredited that it should be ignored. The forums were announced as being "informational''.

Yet when the tour went on ZBM television a week and a half ago it was almost exclusively pro-Independence and around the parishes it has not been very different. It may be just as well that surveys show that less than ten percent of the public gets its Independence information from panels and that the number of television viewers is unlikely to be significant. Then too, the parish panels have not drawn crowds.

There is a widely held opinion that the appearance on ZBM television, which was not announced as a party political broadcast and which ran well over time, was simply embarrassing to the United Bermuda Party. It was so strongly pro-Independence and so at variance with what had been promised to the people that it discredited the panel as a source of information and raised questions of integrity about the UBP.

The problem seems to have come about because the panel which was supposed to inform Bermudians was not balanced from the beginning. The Hon. Clarence Terceira, who is anti-Independence, has been largely absent from the panel. He was not on ZBM TV even though he was in Bermuda. The Hon. Jerome Dill is the Minister of Information and does his best to remain neutral and supply information. The Hon. David Saul sits on the fence but contributes very little that is relevant. The other two, The Hon. Maxwell Burgess and the Hon. John Irving Pearman are openly spreading pro-Independence propaganda as information. At best the panel has generally consisted of two members who were strongly and openly pro-Independence and two who tried to be neutral.

Where were the anti-Independence representatives? They were generally in the audience and the sad thing is that they were left off the UBP panel but comprise about 90 percent of the UBP following.

Does the hierarchy of the United Bermuda Party really think the public is stupid enough to accept this kind of panel as credible and valid? Does it believe that it can flagrantly mislead the people and just go on about its business without being held accountable? Does it think it is without responsibility to behave in a straightforward way? Does it understand in any way the terrible example being set by this charade? There has been an implication that if the public received information from the panel which produced the Green Paper, a paper which sinned by omission, then it would be getting correct and unbiased information. The information has certainly not been unbiased.

Has it been correct? The public has to be the judge of that.