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The key thing to understand about Bermuda's political history is that the United Bermuda Party was not perfectly dominant. Bermuda is often overlooked in the international scholarship on dominant-party systems. Studies prefer to focus on examples like post-war Japan, Singapore, modern Russia or apartheid-era South Africa. In the case of the United Bermuda Party, dominance was always precarious and based on an uneasy alliance of electoral interests - the party came close to losing power on at least three occasions before 1998, and its ability to stay in power owes more to fortunate circumstances and clever political manoeuvring than it does to genuine political dominance. There wasn't so much as a 'slide downwards' as there was an enormously bumpy rollercoaster ride, with many highs and lows in what proved to be (from 1968 and despite criticism by the opposition) a fairly robust democratic system.

##1834 - 1959: Origins of Bermudan Politics

Although today we mostly think of the territory as a holiday destination or offshore banking location, Bermuda's parliamentary democracy is arguably among the oldest in the world. In 2020, its legislature will have existed without meaningful interruption for 400 years, and we have a fairly good understanding of how Bermudan electoral politics worked from the outset. For most of Bermudan history the legislature existed - as was the case in the wider British Caribbean - to represent the interests of wealthy white plantation owners, and provide for practical law-making on local issues. The men who sat in and voted for the House of Assembly were either slave owners or heavily invested in the slave economy; although Bermuda has never achieved full independence from Britain, by the 19th century the colony was remarkable for how fiercely independent it was of the imperial government in London. Bermuda was the only colony in the region to retain self-government in the late 19th century as Britain strengthened its control over its North American colonies.

When slavery was abolished across the Caribbean in 1838, the white elite in every British colony immediately sought to pass local legislation to restrict the rights and autonomy of the free black population. One common measure of excluding ex-slaves and their descendants from political power was setting an unreasonably high standard for participating in elections: voting at the time was restricted to property owners and in the case of Bermuda, one had to have about £100 worth of property to qualify for the vote (more than double the pre-emancipation requirement). Although this was far from the highest threshold in the region, for a small colony with unique demographics it was more than enough to ensure white dominance in the legislature. Whereas Jamaica's population was approximately 75% black after abolition, Bermuda's was only 53% - middle and upper class whites were much more numerous in Bermudan society and much more able as a result to exclude black people from meaningful participation in economic and public life. Similar restrictions were applied to all aspects of civic governance, including the selection of juries for criminal court cases.

Much like in the United States, the post-emancipation period in Bermuda was characterised by increasingly strict and formal racial segregation. By the early twentieth century, through a mix of enforced legislation and white-imposed social norms, African Bermudan people were pushed to the very margins of society in a system not unlike that of South Africa's apartheid. Almost all social spaces were segregated along racial lines. Swathes of the island were reserved for white housing and in Hamilton's premier district black people were almost entirely excluded from the labour force; the island's Post Office refused to employ any black workers on the grounds that white users would not want their stamps licked by non-white people. Although these policies were also crafted to exclude Asian people (and in many cases, Jewish people) from economic prosperity and civic life, black people were disproportionately targeted. As commercial international travel became increasingly plausible and popular into the early twentieth century these policies were increasingly defended not just in terms of maintaining racial order but guaranteeing the island's economic future. American tourists, the white elite believed, would favour Bermuda as a tourist destination if it kept the familiar racial segregation policies prominent across the United States - and in the 1920s and 1930s new legislation came in to strengthen discrimination against black people as both workers and consumers in the tourist industry.

This was an era in which the interests of the black working class - and even the very small black middle class - were considered utterly unworthy of government attention. If you go to Bermuda today, there is something of an unintentional monument to the anti-black policy pursued by the Bermudan government in the early 20th century in the form of Tucker's Town. Tucker's Town is a district of mainland St George's that has a history dating right back to the very beginnings of the island's colonisation; today it is famous for playing host to the holiday homes of all manner of super-wealthy international politicians and business people, including (for example) Michael Bloomberg. But historically Tucker's Town was an impoverished black working class community, focused on farming and fishing as its main industries. Rather than investing in the well-being of the community, the settlement was forcibly cleared between 1920 and 1923 by Bermuda's colonial government with the express intention of creating a tourist resort and holiday home destination for wealthy white people from abroad. Its residents were scattered and relocated against their will to other parts of the island. Many young black working class men in this period were rendered homeless, living as beggars on the dockyards. Even some white observers in the early 20th century were increasingly concerned that Bermuda - now 65%, not 53%, black - was jeopardising its future stability and economic prosperity by pursuing segregation with such intensity.

But the 1920s was also a politically trans-formative time for black Bermudans. Black communities were becoming increasingly cohesive and self-organised in the face of aggressive government repression; more and more mutual aid societies were appearing, and from the mid-1920s the first major black newspaper entered into circulation. This was also the time when white women began to agitate most fiercely for their rights: a group of prominent white Bermudan women, inspired by the work of their sisters in Great Britain, launched Bermuda's organised suffragette movement in 1923. One year later, a young medical practitioner called Dr Edgar Gordon (also known as 'Mazumbo', an African name Gordon adopted for political reasons in protest at the refusal of white newspapers to address him with an honorific title) - a black man who would forever change the course of Bermudan history - arrived on the island. Gordon was forced to sit an incredibly complex medical exam by Bermuda's accrediting authorities (one set to a much higher standard than for any white doctor) and although he passed, segregation excluded him from working in most medical establishments.

In 1944 (the year white Bermudan women won the vote), Gordon would found what later became the Bermuda Industrial Union (BIU), a trade union intended to give a voice to the black working class - and fight for the abolition of segregation in all aspects of Bermudan life. This marked the beginning of a period of black political radicalisation that mirrored developments elsewhere in the British Caribbean, where trade union movements arising out of the Great Depression were giving birth to pro-independence and pro-black political parties across the region. In 1946 Gordon and the BIU scandalised the House of Assembly when a delegation from the Union took a petition - signed by 5,000 people - directly to London demanding the British government interfere in Bermuda's affairs on behalf of its black population (a request the British government did not take particularly seriously). In 1948 Gordon himself became a member of the colonial legislature, albeit narrowly, overcoming the strict property laws that restricted the franchise. Through the 1940s and 1950s the Union (and Gordon until his death in 1955) agitated for civil rights for black people, though their successes were limited. It seemed unlikely Bermuda was ever going to join the path taken by other islands like Jamaica towards multi-racial democracy.

Until June 11th, 1959.