Mere myrmidons? Fie on you

Well, boo to them. We have our own Peter Roffey, who knows so much stuff, including the word 'myrmidon' (which, so the nice lady at this week's Treasury meeting told me, means an unthinking follower). Indeed, were he and his colleagues at the Guernsey Press deputies, rather than lofty and brilliantly knowledgeable commentators, all our problems in the States would be solved.

I jest. There wouldn't be any problems, because they would all have been anticipated by these clever people and headed off at the pass. If one is the subject of criticism from this paragon, one sits up. One takes notice. One is downcast. And one then wishes to hide in a corner and call for one's mum.

One of the most recent tablets of stone (I feel that I have to give it the significance of those found at the foot of Mount Horeb in the wilderness of Sinai) inveighed against the joint Social Security and Treasury Boards for 'a stunning degree of naivety and complete lack of political antennae' in coming up with the PTR package. ('Car-crash proposals were almost designed to fail', 20 April) It was 'half thought through'. It didn't provide States' Members with 'a fraction of the information they'd need.' (380 pages by the way: not so dusty in my view).

And we – the pathetic and unquestioning myrmidons – just went along with this disgraceful package which 'hammered the poor and elderly'. Strong stuff.

It is hard, I admit, to counter such criticism in a letter to a newspaper, because to do a proper job of it would take the length of the policy letter itself (111 pages of text and 269 of supporting research).

Let me say two things only about the proposals. First, the joyous fact that we have an ageing population does mean, inevitably, that our insurance funds will not cope. Second, there is no question of hammering anybody. By way of example, removing universal benefits is surely sensible?

Is it right for a wealthy individual to receive a subsidy from the government every time he visits his GP? Isn't it better to target those who need the subsidy? And by the way (sorry, I know I said two, but may I sneak in a third?) means-testing is not the expensive procedure which the nay-sayers love to pray in aid: the software can easily be made to establish from a Social Security perspective whether an individual's annual income falls below a given benchmark. But these are, in the larger scheme of things mere cavils. There are none so blind as those who cannot see, and paradoxically it really is too much to hope that a dyed-in-the-wool left-winger such as Peter Roffey will ever accept the logic of a radical solution proposed by the joint boards. 'Oh my paws and whiskers! they've actually tried to do something. We can't have that.'

No. What has upset the even tenor of the Perrot day is that Mr Roffey is gravely affronted by the idea that the members of the joint boards had (dare I utter the words?) CRIB SHEETS in the debate.

There, I have admitted it. But before I mount the naughty step, may I say that I do not regard it as in any way wrong for the essential points of an argument to be set out in notes. Ministers often have full blown speeches prepared before they introduce policy letters. Non-ministers so very often have their own speeches prepared for a specific debate (and so very often, alas, read them out in full, irrespective of what has been said earlier in the proceedings). Mr Roffey was famous in his day for speaking in an apparently extempore way. Well, we don't all have that ability, and the arguments and counter-arguments set out in over 300 pages of text and statistics needed to be – for me at least – in a summary form. And after all, summaries of arguments are only distillations of what we all take into the chamber – our Billets. Perhaps when he returns to the States after his re-election Mr Roffey will insist that members learn all their Billets by heart. So I ask that Mr. Roffey, after a hard day of being omniscient and perhaps working a miracle or two (say, walking back from Herm, or feeding the Press editorial staff to bursting using only an old veggie-burger and two small anchovies, or something like that), and whilst choice handmaidens dust off a grape or two for him and pass him a glass of lightly chilled Puligny-Montrachet to cool him down in the quiet of the evenfall, give a thought to us ordinary mortals, and accept that we are as nothing as compared with the political giants who went before us and need notes to help us.

And while I'm at it, may I, with the greatest respect of course, enter a demurral at Mr Roffey's slander that I am told what to think. How dare he say that? Indeed, Mr Roffey's ivory tower seems to have insulated him from any real knowledge of the characters of whom the two boards comprise. Lobby-fodder? Really? Deputies such as Spruce, Le Clerc, Inglis, Kuttelwascher (blimey: I'd only try to tell him what to think if I were standing a cricket pitch away, and only then if fully padded up), Adam, James and Gollop (blimey, again). No. What happens in the real world in a case such as this is that there is much debate by the two boards around a table. Of course not everybody has the same view. But gradually, there is distilled something which the joint boards (and of course I mean their individual members) can collectively support. That is the civilised, statesmanlike, way to do it.

Does Mr Roffey really, genuinely, think that I would vote against my conscience? If so, he little remembers the '80s. Perhaps the truth is that Mr Roffey can't face the fact that 10 people think one thing and that he thinks another: that of those 11 people including him (and I haven't even mentioned thus far non-States' members such as the superb John Hollis) he thinks that he is the only one marching in step.

I can't respond to the Roffey article without pointing out that during his tenure as Minister at HSSD Mr Roffey did not quite reach the standard of political perfection which he demands of others in his bi-weekly manifesto. He was perhaps just the teensiest weeniest bit open to criticism for leaving the department in a less than buoyant state when he handed in his (metaphorical) ministerial bicycle eventuating, indirectly, in two succeeding ministers having to fall on their swords. And his somewhat optimistic budgeting proposals (at £9.7m.) for the electronic patients' records' system (EHSCR to the cognoscenti) presented by him to the States in December 2006 haven't exactly come up to snuff. (I have been involved over the past two years on behalf of Treasury in trying to ensure that the project has been put back on the rails from which it had departed). Up to now the forecast cost will be £11.3m., plus the amount in addition authorised by the States at the last budget of £650,000.

The point is that things are never perfect. I know that. It would be a little less disheartening if those in the media who are so quick to criticise absolutely everything carried out by the States and its various entities were to bear in mind that we do try to do our best, rather than to adopt the attitude of pompous sanctimony of which they are such gifted exponents. Of course the States must always be open to scrutiny by the media and those who feed from it: but that exercise needs to be tempered with a touch of reality.

It was a jolly jape to refer to us as myrmidons. One of their other characteristics – so the nice lady also told me – was that of being fighters. I suggest that Mr Roffey continue to watch this space.

DEPUTY ROGER PERROT