Vexed Bermoothes

Here’s an article about girls basketball from the New Yorker.  But it’s about so much more.  It also says a lot about the strategy of politics in Bermuda.

Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet.

The coach realised that his inexperienced team would take a drubbing if they played the conventional way.  So he decided to play a full court press all the time – hassling the other team every inch down the court so that their carefully prepared plays were lost in fluster and unexpected obstacles.

His inexperienced team went the whole way to the playoffs.

And here’s the relevance to Bermuda.  The PLP are not particularly effective at running Government, even after 10 years on the job.  But they play every move with a passionate full court press, often to the point of absurd heavyhandedness.

In the ensuing flurry of elbows, UBP seem to be lost in waiting for the referee to enforce the rules, or for the audience to cry foul.  They are so polite and choreographed.  As they make their points, the continual circus of Bermuda politics seems to roll right past.  In frustration, their legitimate arguments and condemnations can sound shrill.

An Opposition is by definition on the defence.    But ours certainly will be more effective if they add some calm aggression and apply a “full court press.”  Politics doesn’t just happen in the House – it happens every day.

The PLP were elected in 1998 by breaking some of the “conventions” of their past.  The UBP are unlikely to succeed by just playing a “waiting game” for PLP scandals to pile up.  They need to stop being defined as the Opposition and whiny critics, simply responding to whatever crap the Premier stirs up this week.  They too must stop being so conventional, and start defining the agendas of Bermuda politics.