Dear Sir,

As far back as I can remember, there have always been two parties sitting in the House of Assembly, other than the days when an independent candidate was elected.

Each of the two parties in the House represents the people who elected them there to do the people’s business — one side represents the Government, while the other side represents the Opposition, and that’s OK.

It should be clear to most that both sides have an important job to do. But no matter what the presentations made on the floor of the House by whoever the parliamentarian may be, they must make sense to those in the House as well as to us out here in the public domain who are listening to what is being said and how it is being said.

For most of the past 4½ years before the last election, I have been watching the country deteriorate in bad shape in one area after another. Some parts of our tribe roads and Railway Trails were almost impassable, and some of our parks and camping grounds had so much overgrowth that it seemed that they were competing with the Amazon jungle.

Our public infrastructure was left in such bad shape, the buses were also left in bad shape and were in the filthiest condition I have ever seen them. About 75 out of a fleet of 105 buses were parked because there were no parts available to fix them, such was the case with more than half of the trash trucks.

The bus terminal needed some repair work done to it that never got done for the longest while, and still has not as yet been attended to and we had to put together work gangs to clean up and get our schools in order because they were left in such bad shape just before school was to open.

The police station in St George’s, which had been promised to be opened soon after the election of 2012, has remained closed right up until today. All I could see on just about every road one travels in Bermuda is this out-of-control overgrowth of weeds into the roads.

I ask myself, how come there was so much apparent neglect to our country? As I further investigated why the country was in such bad shape, I discovered that because of the Government’s early-retirement scheme in the Civil Service and job cutbacks of those that did the manual labour out in the field, there was not enough people working in each department to do the work and that it was so bad that they had, in some cases, two people doing the work of five people.

So Sir, I find it amusing and humorous to be sitting at home watching the evening news, and here is the Leader of the Opposition, Patricia Gordon-Pamplin, trying to convince me that the reason why buses could not be fixed was because when the One Bermuda Alliance took over the Government, the Progressive Labour Party had left the public purse empty.

If that was the case, and money does not grow on trees like they said, where did the OBA all those millions to help to fund the America’s Cup? And why give up so many concessions as well if there was no money available to give?

The next big question I ask is this: if the country was in so much debt, why then give away one of the Government’s most important and biggest money earner, such as the airport, to a foreign company seemingly without much thought?

You want to know the amazing and funny thing about this comedy show, Sir — 13,832 people voted for the OBA and its nonsense. What the heck were they thinking?

E. McNEIL STOVELL