Soulsby - 2020 seating plan has fuelled toxicity in States
TOXICITY and bad behaviour in the States was partly fuelled by the original seating plan in the Chamber, a senior politician has said.
Former Policy & Resources vice-president Heidi Soulsby is now in her third term of office. She said that ‘dirty politics’ had got progressively worse over that time, and particularly when a seating plan was drawn up for the Chamber in 2020.
The seating plan was created by the Bailiff to accommodate and group together members of the Guernsey Party and the former Guernsey Party of Independents group, which emerged from the 2020 election.
‘At the beginning of this States it was decided to have those in particular parties sat opposite each other and I don’t think that type of assembly is right for our form of government,’ she said.
‘It calls for division and you could see that all it would do is lead to conflict which is not what our system is about.'
She was speaking during a debate hosted by Women in Public Life to gather ideas to improve compassion and behaviour in the States.
Deputy Soulsby was joined on the panel by former TV journalist and co-founder of Compassion in Politics Jennifer Nadel, Education, Sport & Culture president Andrea Dudley-Owen and founder of culture and governance consultancy, CoSteer, Perrin Carey.
They discussed the lack of compassion within local politics and potential solutions.
Last summer, there was a trend of simultaneous walk-outs from some deputies when certain colleagues stood up to speak.
Deputy Dudley-Owen alluded to the walk-outs to deputies being on the ‘older side’, needing toilet breaks and having hidden disabilities requiring them to stand up and walk around.
She said it was not as bad as some deputies would claim and that the previous States Assembly was worse in terms of behaviour.
‘I cannot account for why people leave, but a lot of this is subjective,’ she said.
She said behaviours were worse in the 2016-20 States.
‘I heard bad language, I heard shouting, I saw a lot of crying, I saw a lot of adversarial goings on outside of chamber, and actually inside the chamber, which were witnessed by court staff, members, by media, by people coming into the chamber.
'I think that in my experience last term was much worse than this term.’
The panel agreed that the code of conduct was not the right tool for members of the public to hold deputies to account and for politicians to hold each other to account, and should be refocused to include behaviour.
