Promises, promises

IN A RECENT piece by fellow columnist Horace Camp he explained that in order to write at his best he usually needs to be really fired up about an issue. I found this interesting because I write at my worst when the blood runs fast and hot. The most telling images and the right words come to me only after I have wiped the red mist of outrage and resentment from my eyes with the cool sponge of measured reflection. During my one term as a States deputy, I often found myself listening to debates and thinking to myself that the issue at hand would benefit from more light than heat. In my view the best speeches of the last political term – but not always the most successful in terms of votes secured – were those delivered with the warm light of a lantern rather than with the searing heat of a blowtorch. Passion can be the fuel that drives individual States members and committees to get things done, but it rarely helps them to see straight.

I hope readers will excuse the above homily; its purpose is to explain my approach to enjoying the privilege of a regular column in this newspaper. I regard my role as that of a parliamentary sketch writer, holding States members to account through commentary on what they reveal of themselves by what they say and don’t say when gathered in the Assembly as our government. The States of Deliberation provides us with a theatre of its own distinct character and when it comes to helping the public to appreciate the plots and sub-plots of its productions, it helps to have once been a member of the cast. I will do my best to bestow praise and inflict criticism in equal measure with all the even-handedness I can muster, accompanied by a liberal dose of irreverent leg-pulling and tongue-in-cheekery to which only those with the thinnest of skins – and they do exist out there, often the ones who like dishing it out themselves – could possibly object. Government is of course a serious matter, but politicians can sometimes take themselves too seriously; when they do, someone needs to pick up the pin of satire and prick the pomposity of their political bubble.

If we are looking for pomposity, there are rich veins of the stuff in all those election manifestos where grandiose claims to all the virtues under the sun compete for space with reckless promises and intentions. For the class of 2020 it was in the Budget debate that their claims and promises first collided with the reality of government, sometimes head on. Let’s be crystal clear, those manifesto promises were made in the full knowledge of the state of Guernsey’s public finances. The estimated damage to the economy and our public finances inflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic was in the public domain throughout the general election campaign. If anything, the actual loss of revenues and the consequent increased level of spending and borrowing have proved to be less severe than the forecasts available to election candidates. Similarly, Aurigny’s soaring indebtedness and the impending arrival of a post-Brexit era, deal or no deal, with its potential to harm our economy, were known to all. So there can be no tolerance of any elected deputies who, on arriving in government, claim to have been shocked to see their election pledges founder on the rocks of unexpected economic woes. What they were selling was electoral snake oil and they knew it – as we should know it now.

The true test of those deputies who promised no tax rises, no new taxes and a reduction in public spending whilst at the same time stimulating Revive and Thrive and improving the delivery of front-line services will come next year when the completed fiscal review is debated in the Assembly. That will be some battle. By comparison, the debate over the 2021 Budget was just a preliminary skirmish at the end of which members granted their own committees inflation-busting increases using money that doesn’t exist. How difficult was that! Despite election promises to reduce the size of government and eliminate waste and inefficiency – promises freely made by the Guernsey Party as well as by other independent candidates – the challenge of using cash limits as the most effective, ready-to-hand means to that end was neatly ducked. HSC’s budget for 2021 represents a rise of 8.5% compared to 2020, whilst ESC at 7.8%, P&R 7.3%, Home 4.7%, ESS 4.5%, and E&I 3.6% will receive increases far above the 2% rate of annual inflation. That spells larger, not smaller, government.

In my view, P&R were wise to eschew austerity and the blunt instrument of arbitrary cash limits, but the contrast between cynical election rhetoric and real policy decisions made once elected could scarcely be more stark.

One exception was the 1% rise imposed on Economic Development’s budget. Since everyone wants to grow the economy as an indispensable part of Revive and Thrive, this appears to be a weird approach, but perhaps P&R had noted the ED president’s legendary ‘throwing money is what I do’ speech and decided that the less money he has to throw around the better.

The second exception was the 24.7% reduction in the budget of the Overseas Aid & Development Commission. This was an easy-to-make decision with no adverse local consequences, so it was eagerly grabbed to serve as a shabby token of P&R’s fiscal prudence.

If the Assembly is a theatre, there were two classic moments when the audience and actors must have wished for the floor to open up so that they could hide from the toe-curling embarrassment to which they were helpless captives. The first was performed by … yes, you’ve guessed it…Deputy Meerveld. For his contribution to the debate on a budget amendment proposed by Deputy Roffey he had prepared a pantomime skit. He had obviously rehearsed it, but that did not rescue it from the cardinal sin of being distinctly unfunny. Indeed, it could not have been less funny if he had been announcing the results of the local euchre league. In short, it fell cringingly flat. It is on occasions such as this that we should be grateful States meetings are not televised; just to listen to it made one want to be elsewhere. I was reminded of the excruciating embarrassment of watching an uncoordinated Theresa May do her ‘Dirty Dancing’ act at her last Tory party conference, looking for all the world as if she were a marionette whose strings were being pulled by a drunken puppeteer. Yes, it was that bad. Deputy Roffey responded by advising the hapless Deputy Meerveld not to give up the day-job and then, on reflection, wishing that he would indeed give it up. That got the laugh that had eluded the pantomime dame.

More embarrassment of a different kind came the next day. Deputy Trott was in full flow in praise of Guernsey Finance when up jumped Deputy Taylor, who was keen to inform the Assembly – and presumably the wider community, too – that he had contributed more to the Guernsey economy in his short life than Deputy Trott had in his undoubtedly longer life. So there! That sort of ‘my dad is bigger than your dad’ stuff goes on in primary schools but most of us grow out of it. Am I really old-fashioned to believe that puerile claims to bragging rights somehow seem a bad fit when a supposedly mature jurisdiction is debating its annual Budget during a pandemic? Deputy Inder was in similar mode, reminding Deputy Trott and the Assembly that in their choice of president for Economic Development they had secured the priceless services of a veritable business tycoon. Such modesty. In my experience, people who feel it necessary to tell me how great they are almost certainly aren’t.

It wasn’t all about embarrassment. There was much to applaud. Some new members delivered well-constructed, platitude-free speeches with fluency and conviction, thereby setting standards beyond the reach of some returning deputies – and of several newcomers, judging by their early offerings. Deputies Bury, Fairclough, Falla and Kazantseva-Miller all caught the eye as assets to the new Assembly. The latter made one point which particularly pleased me. I note a presumption in some quarters that private enterprise is superior to public service enterprise and that those deputies with experience of private business bring a supreme, almost mystical wisdom to the Assembly. There was strong evidence of the arrogance of this presumption throughout the Budget debate. Deputy Kazantseva-Miller effectively challenged such an ill-founded narrative more tactfully and less provocatively than I could manage these days. Perhaps like me she has been on the receiving end of poor service from some private businesses – both small and large – whose levels of inefficiency would simply not be tolerated in the public sector.

Deputy Helyar provided the biggest laugh of the entire debate with his line, ‘I once examined Deputy Trott’s crabs’. Equally importantly, his response to the Budget debate was spot on in its measured tone and in addressing directly the substantial points that had been raised in debate. It requires only modest talent to deliver a prepared speech, even a Budget speech, but responding ex tempore to a debate is an altogether more difficult art at which the majority of the current principal committee presidents do not excel. Commendably, Deputy Helyar confronted the issue of reconciling election pledges with the reality of government; he acknowledged that some promises would inevitably have to be broken and that he was ready to face up to the consequences. By contrast, an irritable Deputy Inder had previously complained that references to what had been promised by election candidates in order to get elected were irrelevant once they were elected and tackling the problems which face them. I wonder how many of the 24,647 people who voted last October agree that States members should not be held to account for their election pledges simply because it irritates Deputy Inder and embarrasses some of his colleagues.

I end on a note which in its way sums up what the Budget debate was all about. Hats off to Deputy Vermeulen, who had the gumption to do what he had promised to do in his election manifesto. He had promised to encourage the growth of local production and export of distilled alcoholic products, and true to his pledge he laid an amendment to the Budget that would reduce the duty on such products. Wow! You could hear the huge sucking of P&R and Home Affairs’ teeth on the radio. Anybody would have thought that he was proposing to link Guernsey to Jersey by tunnel rather than simply daring to fulfil a modest election pledge. A sopping wet blanket was dropped on him and his amendment together with the disingenuous advice that his initiative required further consideration. In other words, forget it.

To be fair, there were good reasons why his amendment was not straightforward, but then there always are good reasons for doing nothing in government.

That’s why this Assembly could prove to be every bit as prone to words rather than action as its recent predecessors were.

Well tried Deputy Vermeulen, and welcome to the reality of government.