Derrick Burgess

You can only feel sorry for Derrick Burgess, our Minister of Labour and Immigration. He's as dim as a 15 watt bulb. Limiting foreign workers to six year terms wasn't his idea. He inherited the Ministry a few months ago,

People who visit Bermuda say that the place is 30 years behind the rest of the world. It's a natural consequence of the isolation of a small group of islands 800 miles from the US and 3,500 from Europe. When visitors comment on Bermuda's out-of-date ways, what they haven't said until now is that, in one important respect, Bermuda is like East Germany was 30 years ago.

Although our internal differences are often put down to economics, the theme running through Bermuda society these days is racism. No one plays the card better or more frequently than members of our first PLP- controlled black Government, elected in 1998 after what we constantly refer to as "400 years of abuse" at the hands of whites. The first PLP government set out to change the economic order by favouring blacks in the awarding of government contracts. Such behaviour is entirely illegal under our Constitution, but we don't worry much about that. Just this week, our Minister of Transport, Dr. Ewart Brown, who is black, said that Government was embarked on a policy of "compensatory economics — compensating for the injustices of the past."

The greatest achievement of our first experience of a Progressive Labour Party (PLP) government was supposed to be the $68 million construction of a new secondary school, the Berkeley Institute.We already have a Berkeley Institute, which has produced almost the entire black professional cadre that runs the Civil Service and the government. Building a new school a few hundred yards up the road from the first one was considered important by the new government.

Stevedoring Services Limited vs. Derrick Burgess et al. - Bermuda Supreme Court

Derrick Burgess vs. Dean Abbott et al. - Bermuda Supreme Court

Derrick Burgess vs. Donald Adderly (t/a "Donald Adderly Real Estate") - Bermuda Supreme Court

Madge Smith vs. David Brangman et al. - Bermuda Supreme Court