This 'government' is not working – who will fix it?

THE political pundit with a copy deadline and publishing date straddling the most emotive debate to have taken place in this States Assembly is put in quite a quandary. Does he comment upon the likely outcome of the debate knowing it will have been put to bed or have reached a completely different final outcome by the time anyone reads it?

This pundit isn't going to do it, so as much as I would like to give my views on the Education debacle (no, debacle wasn't an autocorrect decision) I will instead focus on what's wrong with our system of government and why this debate is causing more problems than it will solve.

The Great and Wise Deputy Dave Jones, our very own Wizard of The Vale, said a very profound thing on Sunday's BBC Guernsey phone-in. The gist of it was that the electorate of Guernsey are not presented with a list of the proposals that will be coming before the Assembly in the next four years and therefore they have no way to use their vote to influence the outcomes. Consultation is therefore used to give the people a chance to have a say between elections.

The problem with that is votes have to be counted but consultation can be, and is, regularly ignored. Following this through, I come to the conclusion that the people of Guernsey have no real say in the decisions taken in their name and this could explain why 20,000 don't even bother to sign up to the electoral roll and another 10,000 who are on the roll probably won't vote.

Out of nearly 50,000 eligible to vote, probably 30,000 won't even bother. That's dreadful in a modern democracy. There is something wrong with our system.

Imagine 1 May 2016, when our 38 elected representatives, probably the vast majority of them newbies, excitedly prepare to govern us.

Every one of them will have a sort of rough plan in their head, mostly made up of big bullet points.

Cut spending. Help the poor. Close schools. Don't close schools. Save the polar bears. Tax corporates more. Don't tax corporates more. Restore selection. Don't restore selection. Investigate GST. Don't investigate GST.

Then the new boards of departments whose names we can't recall yet will be filled. The person with the most relevant big bullet point will be the president. The other members will be selected randomly.

The boards will then meet for the first time. They will pick up the leftover work from the last lot and will park their 'plans' until they clear the log-jam.

At first that's very easy. The president will pick up the draft of the last minister's speech, top and tail it a bit and present it to the Assembly as his or her own.

But after a while all the busy work will get done and then they will all look around for things to fill their time. The boards will have a list of things the States asked their predecessors to look at and all will believe they have to change something.

Imagine, in the current Assembly, if the original traffic strategy – just keep doing what we are doing but tweak it a bit – hadn't been usurped by a minority report suggesting a revolutionary way forward. Or if Education had come back and said things are going pretty well, the high school leadership problems are sorted and they are starting to blossom. Things are a bit fragile now so we suggest business as usual and look at it again in 2020.

We could have avoided two of the biggest catalysts for public discontent while the Assembly concentrated on the real issues, which are to balance our books, break out of recession and protect our economy in a very hostile world.

Quite simply, a Jack of all trades, master of none Assembly that can't plan or prioritise and which achieves its mandate to govern based only on a promise 'to do our individual best' is not fit for purpose in the 21st century.

It worked with part-time deputies who embraced a culture of changing from the status quo only when absolutely necessary. Full-time deputies all driven by change and a desire to 'make brave decisions' without any form of control is pure madness.

I once sold Guernsey on its stability, its generally slow rate of change, which can become super-fast on the rare occasion it is needed, and the fact that it wasn't a clone of England. The last few Assemblies have shown those values no longer hold true. We are a hotbed of revolutionary change led by our monarchist, communist, conservative, socialist, liberal, fascist coalition, presided over by anarchists who don't believe in plans or order.

Please, please someone sort this out. We have lived through four years of being guinea pigs in one experiment after another. As adults we were prepared to take it, but when the lives and future of our children are at stake it's time to say enough is enough.

The hour has come. Is there a man or woman out there brave enough to grasp it?

Getting it straight

PITY the poor hack in his lonely garret, putting pen to paper, writing the purple prose which he believes will generate the public adulation he desires without knowing if he is even being read at all.

Imagine, therefore, dear reader, how my heart jumped when I was quickly contacted following publication of my last column by two of our island's leading politicians. Not only am I being read, I'm being read by the great and the good. Obviously they had to dream up an excuse for contacting me to prevent my already inflated ego going stratospheric, but I know my words touched them.

They wanted to point out that Deputy Burford was the only member of the Public Services Department to vote against extending the Condor Ferries mandate and add that my reference to her being a Policy Council member could have caused confusion, as the ferries mandate wasn't a matter decided upon by the Policy Council.

I promised I'd give them a correction in this column and I'm not going to let my biggest fans down.