We need to make it work

That’s not a phrase I use every day, but it’s true. He ended 2017 being accused by some of being an overbearing dictator. Yet at the same time others were characterising him as the powerless ‘leader’ of a rudderless government which desperately needed a dose of centralised executive control. He really couldn’t win, but let’s unpack both sides of that equation.

Firstly, we don’t have executive government (or rather all the executive powers are held by the Assembly itself) so the president of P&R has few if any levers of control.

It was always thus and it means Guernsey expects its top politician to lead by dint of force of character alone. Well, that and by displaying the sort of obvious abilities which inspire other deputies to trust his or her leadership and direction.

That’s a tougher task than it sounds. Since the year dot presidents of A and F, chief ministers, and now presidents of P&R, have faced the same conundrum. Some States members will be moaning that they are not displaying enough leadership while others mutter darkly, ‘who does he think he is? We don’t have executive government, you know’.

To be honest, I have probably been in both camps at different times.

In this particular Assembly the difficulty of leading simply by inspiring confidence and loyalty is probably even greater than it usually is.

Why?

Well, we started the term with a 20-20 tie over who would make the best ‘top politician’. That couldn’t be helped, but there is no doubt that it left a slightly divided House in its wake.

I had thought that the months had healed that split, but the recent 20-19 election of Deputy Parkinson to the presidency of Economic Development did seem to rekindle the embers of that division somewhat. We will never know for sure, but I suspect there was a strong correlation between the way in which members voted in both of those elections 18 months apart.

If so, we really have to make an effort to bury any feelings of tribalism or belonging to a particular camp because otherwise our system of consensus government can’t possibly work – and my goodness, we have some huge issues to tackle in 2018.

So would an executive/party system of government be any better? Would it allow a coordinated and cohesive government programme to be driven through the States no matter how divided the Assembly might be?

After all, the party or coalition which commanded a majority would win the day and while the malcontents might moan and gnash their teeth, they couldn’t actually block the approved policy programme.

Instead of delay and procrastination we would see real progress. What’s more, that programme would have been endorsed by the voting public who would have elected parties on the strength of their manifestos.

It all sounds hunky-dory, but I am not so convinced.

Firstly, putting all the executive powers in the hands of a small group of politicians (a cabinet) would only work if we did have party politics. If we were still all independents, then they would have no built-in majority in the States. Effectively they would be very much a minority government – and we all know those never last long or perform very well.

So let’s assume we did have parties. After all, there is nothing stopping them now. People sometimes say we have a non-party system, but that’s not written in stone. In fact it’s only because deputies and candidates never choose, for whatever reason, to form any parties.

If they did, would any party come anywhere close to enjoying a majority?

I doubt it, particularly in the early years of transition when I suspect the public would still be electing a significant number of independents. In fact I doubt any coalition could even command a majority in those early days without so compromising on their manifestos that the resulting coalition document looked very anodyne indeed.

OK, let’s jump that transition period and assume that party politics had become well ingrained in the island.

I predict the two leading parties would be a very economically conservative party of business and a more centralist/liberal party quite focused on social issues. Either one would dominate for decades (probably the right-leaning one), which would be unhealthy, or else the island would flip flop between the two. Not only would that mean a lot of time and effort being spent undoing what the last lot had done but it would undermine Guernsey’s reputation for political stability.

Then there is the question of whether the States will ever attract sufficient political talent to squander half of it in opposition.

What’s more, it would be almost impossible to operate a credible system of collective responsibility in Guernsey. Cabinet members would loyally sign up to approved policies and pretend to believe in them but their fellow islanders would know full well they were lying because they would remember what they had said previously.

‘Deputy Bloggs is saying we should scrap family allowances but he stood on a policy of increasing them eight years ago.’

What do I conclude? Well there are pros and cons to both our current system and one which would operate on a party/executive basis. Let those who believe in reform and have been muttering about it for years now show some conviction and backbone by going ahead and forming parties if they think that is what Guernsey wants.

In won’t be me, though. If I am in anybody’s party, then it is Joni Mitchell’s. What do I mean? ‘All in all, it just goes to show, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone’.