I'm hoping that PLP candidate Marc Bean wins the Southampton West Central by-election today.
Yep, you read that right. I hope the PLP wins.
The UBP is moribund. Since the general election it has been engaged in a prolonged bout of navel-gazing that has gone absolutely nowhere, and has been next to useless as an Opposition. I like Kim Swan personally, and generally admired his performance when he was in the Senate, but feel he's done little to stamp his authority on the party and give it any sense of identity. The party's prolonged dithering about its future needs to brought to an end, fast, and I think that's most likely to happen if they lose Southampton West Central to the PLP.
The government's majority is already sufficiently large that winning this extra seat would not translate into any meaningful increase in power for them. With luck, however, such a defeat would be enough to split the UBP in two, giving Bermuda's dysfunctional political environment the huge shake-up that it so badly needs.
It's impossible to say how things would develop from there, but I believe that if their old enemy was significantly weakened, the bonds that bind the PLP and it supporters would weaken too. I believe it would make it much more likely that a new political entity would emerge, formed from the progressive members of both the PLP and UBP camps, that could eventually destroy the current poisonous duopoly. And Bermuda would be so much better for that.
