Richard Graham: Mischief and mayhem

Deputy Trott began last week’s meeting with a statement about the state of the public finances. Nothing like kicking off a party with a bad joke, eh?

Deputy Roffey then delivered a statement reviewing the work of Employment & Social Security over the political term. Having gone out of his way to include a contrite admission that his committee’s record on building affordable housing had been disappointing, he probably wasn’t surprised when Deputy Inder jumped up and asked why he’d claimed the record as a success. Clearly the Economic Development president had pre-primed his missile and was determined to launch it even though the target had failed to appear. Sadly, this Guernsey version of those Tom and Jerry cartoons in which the hapless Tom’s accident-prone attempts to catch Jerry always end in humiliating failure, is set to disappear. Deputy Roffey’s absence from the next Assembly will bring an end to a rib-tickling double act that has regularly entertained us during the last four years.

Next up was Deputy Brouard with a review of Health & Social Care’s performance. He informed members – again – that his team were working tirelessly. The Assembly breathed a communal sigh of relief. Deputy Inder, a defiant smoker, wanted to know why HSC was obsessed with tobacco smoking rather than alcohol drinking. Good point, I thought; when was the last time somebody headbutted their best friend in Town because they’d smoked one cigarette too many?

Question time provided a possible explanation for the dire financial situation that the chief minister had earlier described. The Assembly’s response to learning that Guernsey’s public finances were up the swanny was to spend 20 minutes asking questions about the depth of the water in the Ladies’ Bathing Pool – yet again – and a further 20 minutes while certain know-it-all members generously offered their expert advice on cheese-making to the allegedly clueless amateurs who run the Guernsey Dairy.

Deputy St Pier asked the president of Economic Development what his committee was doing to support the island’s horticultural industry. ‘What horticultural industry?’ came the reply. Apparently, Deputy Inder was not aware of one. I found myself wondering if anybody from Guernsey Clematis in the Vale or the Rocquette Cider orchard in St Andrew’s was listening.

Education Sport & Culture’s policy letter for future funding of our three private colleges had the potential to generate political fun and games, but to the Assembly’s credit a mature exchange of differing views was the dominant characteristic of a debate lasting nine hours.

Deputy Dudley-Owen and her ESC team made a decent fist of fighting their cause, but it soon became clear that the cause was as good as lost. Deputies St Pier and Ferbrache had submitted an amendment aimed at holing the policy letter below the waterline. When those two political heavyweights bury the hatchet and join ranks against a committee, that committee knows it’s in trouble. As Deputy Bury observed in another of her elegant speeches, the odds were stacked against ESC’s proposals, what with there being more Old Elizabethans in the Assembly than women.

For the most part, good parliamentary manners prevailed, although I thought that Deputy Moakes crossed the line and miscalculated the mood of the Assembly when criticising ESC with unnecessary brutality. Admittedly things did get a bit tetchy between Deputies Dudley-Owen and Soulsby towards the end of a long day. If we ever send two astronauts into space to share a small capsule for a few months, it would be best if these two weren’t paired off.

Not for the first time in this political term, an ESC policy letter received a loud raspberry from the Assembly, but Deputy Dudley-Owen led her committee in adopting a conciliatory tone in the face of defeat. In my view, she was right to point out that the role of the States in fully funding its own non-selective model while part-funding the selective college model is inherently awkward. I would go further – the elephant in the room is the unresolved matter of whether the two models should be mutually complementary allies, or mutually suspicious competitors. It seems to me that the latter relationship currently prevails. The lack of symmetry between the models goes beyond their contrasting non-selective/selective policies and their public/private constitutions. Crucially, while the States model harks back to the early days of comprehensive secondary education in England (age 11-16 students in high schools, age 16-18 students in separate sixth form colleges or colleges of further education), our three private colleges mirror the progressive academies in England that have done so much to raise national standards (age 11-18 students in schools with an integral sixth form). It is by now a conventional wisdom that within the next 10 years, what our students are taught and how they are taught will have greatly changed, but I doubt that the reaction of our colleges will be to ditch one of their key advantages, their integral sixth forms. In which case, the next ESC and the wider States might well need to ask themselves early on if our current 11-16 and separate post-16 model provides the best possible challenge to the attraction of our 11-18 colleges, especially since student numbers are set to decrease markedly.

It was 10 o’clock on Friday before Deputy Parkinson, as vice-president of the States Trading Supervisory Board, was able to introduce a policy letter seeking the Assembly’s approval in principle for incorporating Guernsey Water, Guernsey Ports and States Works as States trading companies. A minority of members, alarmed at the prospect of this Assembly resolving to actually do something, and unable to resist the temptation to take up one of the fast-disappearing opportunities to kick cans down the road into the next political term, looked for a champion of delaying tactics to help them out. Deputy Murray tends to be Mr Reliable at such times, and he duly obliged by leading a last-minute sursis motive. He was concerned. Poor chap, he always seems to be concerned. This time, he was so concerned that I lost count of how many things concerned him. He would have told us of many more if the Bailiff hadn’t stopped him because his time was up. By this time, I was feeling thoroughly depressed. Suddenly, I understood what they meant when they used to say that Gordon Brown had only to enter a room to darken it.

Fortunately, Deputy Ferbrache provided a much-needed uplift to spirits. In a classic example of less is more, he delivered a withering condemnation of the sursis, mercilessly exposing it for what it was – a metaphor for all the inaction that has plagued this Assembly. And it took him only two minutes. Other members take note.

Any members intent on challenging Deputy Oliver about the health of the Island Development Plan are advised to make arrangements for a dignified retreat from an inevitably gory battlefield. So it proved when, late on Friday afternoon, with the Assembly’s limited store of goodwill close to running out, Deputies Burford and Bury dared to sursis what the Development & Planning Authority had in mind for the plan’s future. The mere hint of a challenge was enough for the DPA president to take to her Boadicean chariot once more. With wheel blades freshly sharpened and her flanks ably guarded by her trusted outriders, Deputies Kazantseva-Miller and Dyke, she led a furious and irresistible charge across the floor of the debating chamber. The disparate and hastily assembled sursis army had no chance, even though Deputy Oliver’s own vice-president, Deputy Taylor, had defected and was launching rather ineffective arrows at the DPA’s rear. It must have been a magnificent sight. Things got so frantic that at one stage the DPA president mistook Deputy Dyke for Deputy Gollop. Such tragic blue-on-blue incidents happen in the fog of war. And yet, throughout the carnage, I could hear, across the airways, a continuous, barely suppressed chuckle from one amused onlooker. And who was it? I have my suspicions, but I wouldn’t dare voice them without better evidence.

By normal closing time on Friday afternoon, it finally dawned on members that they’d run out of time to finish business. Some seemed genuinely shocked that endless chatting about two nugatory sursis, aggravated by their customary addiction to repetitive speech-making and the self-indulgent refusal of so many members to let their votes do the talking for them, had not only left this meeting’s business undone, but had ensured there would be insufficient time in the two meetings that remained to them. As Deputy Mahoney observed, the only shock was that they should be shocked: they’d had four and a half years’ notice of this. There were cries of ‘disgraceful, terrible governance, failure of democracy’. Yes, you’ve guessed it, the most outraged protests came from some of the Assembly’s most compulsive time-wasters.

I will remember this Assembly for its attempts (thankfully unsuccessful) to redefine decisiveness as the art of deciding not to make decisions. Last week we saw yet again how inconvenient reality is met by simply denying that it exists; hence delay by sursis is, magically, not really delay at all. It’s all too Trump-like for comfort. Much earlier that day Deputy Gollop had predictably supported both sursis and effectively offered the view that there was no point in voting to do anything at all this close to the general election. ‘So we might as well all go home then?’ objected Deputy Moakes. ‘And not come back,’ cried an unidentified wag. But they didn’t, and they will – twice more.