Old habits die hard when it comes to politics game
A new system of government, but nothing much has changed, says Nick Mann. Politics being what it is, the usual issues are surfacing less than four months into the new States with planning, education and the waste strategy showing that April's new broom hasn't swept away much of what was there before. But these minor political spats are likely to be forgotten when the States runs into the tough decisions to be taken on the Budget, pensions and benefits and the full debate on the Island Development Plan
IF ANYONE thought the new system of government would have meant the death of the old ways, last week was a stark reminder that was not the case.
You just can't take the politics out of politics, whatever the system.
First up we have the old 'no they aren't, yes they are' routine over planning, all it was short of in terms of cliche was the phrase 'common sense'.
Economic Development president Deputy Peter Ferbrache wound up planners by suggesting that in his experience they were not flexible and had in the past been a barrier to growth.
Leaping to their defence, the Development & Planning Authority vice-president Deputy Dawn Tindall used the low number of rejections as evidence this was not true – in words that were very reminiscent of the former Environment Department, so reminiscent in fact that you suspect they were simply recycled from a civil servant's desktop.
It is an argument that also conveniently forgets that the low number of rejections has much more to do with the pre-application process and meetings that take place to ensure no-one is wasting their time.
Few people would want to chance an application having been advised it won't succeed by the professionals and also shell out the fee for the privilege of doing so.
Some do not like this kind of petty falling out between political arms of government.
Counter to that, though, is it at least throws the public spotlight on a legitimate issue, in this case the Island Development Plan.
And the key point really has to be that planners can be as flexible as they want, but it can only ever be within the wording agreed in the plan in the first place – the obvious lesson is the States needs to get that right when it is debated, not rely on human characteristics and disputable concepts like flexibility afterwards.
What is going on down at the Committee for Education, Sport & Culture, though, is much more a cause for concern.
This has all the hallmarks of old-fashioned political dithering, like the platoon in Dad's Army trying to solve a problem.
Rolling back on strong hints that the committee would be coming back with the selection issue in November, its president, Deputy Paul Le Pelley, now says it will be next year, that the committee are still listening, and it was reviewing the whole vision for education in general that the previous department championed and had approved.
What really struck home was that for all the advocacy of the need to work much smarter and more efficiently in the States, this is a committee that will not meet again until September because of the holidays.
No worries that thousands of students, their parents, and a whole profession are waiting for certainty, or that a secondary school is crumbling, everything can come to a standstill because the sun is shining – working to a school timetable is not how a government committee should be operating.
There is a nervousness in government about what is, or is not, happening down at Education on this issue and the knock-on impact it has on other policies.
If anyone hears someone shouting 'don't panic' out of the Grange we will all know it is time to do just that.
The rising cost of the waste strategy is another scenario right out of the playbook from years gone by.
Deputies have been briefed that, yes, it could cost more per household than we had all been told it would in the first place.
The public? No confirmation, just a mealy-mouthed admission that it could be higher and that the 2014 estimate was reasonable given it was done before any tendering.
What jars is not so much that the waste strategy could cost households more than first thought, but that even though States Trading Assets is happy to say so to States members, it is equally as happy to keep the public in the dark.
Information leaks out slowly, though, leaving it in a rather uncomfortable position of its own making – neither able to confirm or deny because the final business case has not been submitted.
The costs question has cast a cloud over the waste strategy since it was announced, the delays experienced having only added to the desire to know what is going on.
None of these three issues – a planning spat, a dithering committee, another struggling to be transparent – of themselves are any more than blips along the way at the moment, although the secondary education debate has the potential to be much more.
Politics is currently in something of a vacuum, come later this year when we will have what promises in the times of deficit to be a tough Budget, the pensions and benefits uprating report and the IDP debate, we will have some true tests of this Assembly's character and ways of working.
