Civil service doesn't rule

If, however, his comments truly reflect the sort of philosophy he has applied to his career in the civil service, then Mr Lewis will not be missed.

The electorate is in charge. Not only are Mr Lewis's comments an affront to democracy, because civil servants are there to do what we tell the deputies to tell them to do, but they don't seem to make business sense.

I accept that there would be costs incurred in any organisational change – the time spent planning alone represents a cost. Change equals initial cost. From a purely business perspective, one would hope that the idea would be to save money in the long run.

So is Mr Lewis suggesting that secret government, where deputies are not allowed to 'meddle' in the affairs of the civil service and the media are not allowed access to details of the mechanics of government, would be cheaper in the long run? How can that be? Would you invest in a property or business in Guernsey if the government is creating uncertainty and mistrust, which are inevitable consequences of secrecy? Would you be comfortable entering into any sort of relationship if the other party wasn't forthcoming with information?

I don't know what is to be construed by the word 'meddling'. If the deputies have only been 'meddling', then they haven't been doing their job – they should have been telling the civil servants what to do.

It is not openness and transparency that should be viewed as the cause of any cost of change. A move towards these ideals would only be a correction of a situation which should never have been allowed to arise in the first place – a situation caused by the skulduggery and incompetence of civil servants and deputies in days gone by.

Even if running an open government were more expensive, so what? Surely it's a price worth paying. In the UK, everything is about saving money and they have, in effect, a bankers' dictatorship (as do most countries, because they nearly all have massive debts). In Britain, there is apparently little room for justice or security. Decommissioning in the military, privatising the police, forcing the closure of the likes of Michael Mansfield QC's Tooks Chambers through swingeing cuts in legal aid, secret courts, and there was even a recent call for cessation of the prosecution of persons for any murders during the troubles in Northern Ireland on the grounds that 'we haven't got the time or the money'. That is all occurring in the name of austerity and paying the bankers' bills, which they charge for creating money out of thin air. While bank chairmen, politicians and sleazy celebrities were snorting coke, 80,000 children in Britain were homeless at Christmas 2013.

I'd much rather be poor in a just society, thank you very much. It is rare to have peace without justice unless you have a complete totalitarian police state.

There are a few power-crazed bad eggs but,

in general, I think we seem to have some very good civil servants here, especially in the middle ranks. There seems to be a public mentality that somehow by streamlining the civil service, the island would save money. I don't see that as a given. Had one more civil servant been employed in the checking process in T&R, the Lagan Fraud would not have occurred, and £2.6m. is roughly the equivalent of employing a civil servant for 65 years. Andrew Sloan supposedly flipped his lid because he was under stress. How much of that stress was caused by lack of staff, duff computer systems, reduced resources and the desire to save money by throwing everything into the Hub?

Let's not forget too that the civil servants didn't receive the sort of mega bonuses and salary hikes enjoyed by those in the finance sector and elsewhere when the economy was booming. They forwent those in exchange for job security. It strikes me as somewhat unfair to take that away because times have become hard, largely thanks to the recklessness and dubious dealings of the financiers.

MATT WATERMAN.