Party politics is ‘far less democratic’

This can only be good news, however, if the decisions being made are good ones. To do that we need to have capable politicians representing the will of the majority of the electorate. A decisive States can be a very bad thing indeed if the deputies are idiots or are serving the interests of a minority. There have been numerous times when business people have got into the States and complained, ‘I can’t get my policies through because of bureaucracy and consensus government’, and the ordinary man in the street has been thinking ‘thank heavens for that’.

I’d say Hitler’s government was pretty decisive.

A political party system reduces choice – it does not expand it. It is far less democratic than a government made up of individuals. In the referendum the public had five options to choose from, none of which would have been many people’s choice had they been given a blank sheet of paper. If you have a party system, you usually have just two realistic options, sometimes three, but these days more likely just one, as it is hard to distinguish between the policy packages on offer as parties tend to be supported by the same powerful lobby groups.

As things stand, the States makes a resolution and the following States ratifies or otherwise the proposed legislation arising from that resolution. So there is a checking procedure in place. In the UK, if the Commons decides something, the House of Lords has the power to delay it. The Lords shares the task of making and shaping laws and checking and challenging the work of the government. In Guernsey, if we end up with a single parliament deciding on something and also having the power to implement it straight away, we are leaving ourselves rather exposed to a small number of very powerful individuals, especially as we have no constitution or bill of rights here.

Assuming that the electoral roll which was used in the referendum was accurate for once (and ‘all things SACC’ seemed rather lacking in outside scrutiny to me) then we can say that Option A won fairly and squarely under the rules. But let’s not forget that around about 30-40% of those who could be on the electoral roll have chosen not to be. Of those who are on it, less than half voted in the referendum, and of those who did, around a third chose Option A as their first choice. And the vast majority of those, along with the vast majority of everyone else, I think, would rather have been offered the choice of electing the chief minister directly.

So now we’re into the game of interpreting the ‘resolution’, a task which will probably fall to civil servants as an ‘operational matter’.

‘Of course we knew what we voted for,’ claimed one Option A supporter recently. Perhaps that person can tell us what the civil servants will decide on matters such as whether voters have to use all 38 votes, whether they can use more than one vote on one candidate, how many polling stations there will be and where, who will choose those who count the votes and how much consultation there will be between those running the election and those deciding which roads are closed on the day, etc.

Then we have your edition of the Guernsey Press of 16 October when you reported a suggestion from former deputy Garry Collins which is to change the rules so that candidates have to have 20-30 proposers rather than the current two. This, he argues, will help to ensure that the likelihood of the public having to sift through hundreds of manifestos is reduced, because it will reduce the number of candidates standing. It’s sound logic, but that’s not what the people have voted for, is it? If adopted, it means that the expansion of choice which the public thought they had secured by voting for Option A will have been substantially reduced by a reduction in the overall number of candidates standing.

An indication of how much the public understood the preferential voting system used in the referendum could be obtained by knowing how many of the voters exercised second, third and fourth options. Whilst we know how many exhausted papers there were prior to the final round, SACC is not parting with the information regarding the number of Option A and C voters who exercised their preferential voting right.

MATT WATERMAN,

Flat 2, 3, Burnt Lane,

St Peter Port, GY1 1HL.