States widening the divisions developing in our community

As an example, the education debate has been dichotomised even further since the new States has taken its seats. The new ESC committee is set to propose a model of education so firmly rooted in doing the opposite of everything put forward by the previous committee that it has already lost sight of bringing the rest of the island, including the teaching profession, on-board. It’s as if the members of ESC feel that they have been given a mandate by the entire island for yet another 180-degree turn, and that the only people ever to get behind the previous model were the four deputies by which it was proposed. Many people voiced concerns about that model, though they were far from united by the reasons for their unease. Pause and Review allayed most of their fears – would ‘Pause just until after the next election’ have done so to the same extent?

It is extremely concerning that the so-called Bury-Gabriel amendment failed. The intention of the amendment was not to bring back the two-school model, it was to make sure that ESC really has gone back to the drawing board, not to re-invent the wheel, but to avoid simply rehashing plans that have already been roundly rejected. In referring to its own planned model for educational transformation, the ESC committee talks about the ‘direction of travel’ it ‘wishes to take’. By letting it off the hook with the review element of its president’s own requete, which ultimately played a big part in landing her the job, we are really none the wiser as to why it wishes to take this particular direction of travel. The events of January 2018, when the ‘Gang of Four’ usurped the ESC committee on which she sat, must have been difficult for Deputy Dudley Owen. Without completing the review which she herself insisted was so essential last term, how can she be so sure that she, with her own gang of four new deputies, is choosing the right direction for the island, and for the right reasons?

Over several political cycles, successive committees have overseen huge bodies of work on details for their own plans for educational reform. While many of these details are inexorably linked to the big, emotive issue of the number and size of schools with which we end up, each committee’s proposal must have had at least some merits even to have made it off the starting blocks. ESC must go out of its way to show that the detail it proposes next month is not just one more big U-turn. If it doesn’t, all that will be achieved is a slight re-drawing of the tribal lines, more disharmony in the Assembly, in school staff rooms and in the community, more protests, and further delay to much-needed reform. It is ESC’s responsibility to draw together the right strands from all previous plans in order to create a cohesive model, behind which a true majority of the population can unite. Only then will it be able to order the spades to hit the ground.

Anybody who stands for election to the States deserves respect. As we have seen recently, all of those who win a seat are quickly given a clear picture of the standards of scrutiny and accountability to which they will be held, and the sacrifices they must make in terms of the ability to live a normal life both during and after working hours. It’s not something many people would be prepared to do. However, as Deputy Roffey says, that scrutiny is essential in order to avoid the faith any of us place in our leaders being blind faith, and to ensure we end up with solutions that work for our community. As we saw last term, those who dramatically change their own views or voting patterns without explanation, try to avoid that scrutiny, or get so wrapped up in their own ideas that they forget the importance of keeping the majority of the community on side, will rapidly lose the respect of the electorate. That all of this has already happened this term, less than six months in, makes the next election still feel a very long way away.

Many people will look at the way members voted on the Bury-Gabriel amendment and see what they want to see – a majority of sensible, pragmatic deputies giving a vote of confidence to the ESC committee, asking them to ‘get on with the job and ignore the left-leaning crowd trying to throw yet another spanner in the works’. Unfortunately, as I fear time will tell, what the majority actually voted for was a dangerous precedent – more U-turns, more cloaks and daggers, more smoke and mirrors, more division. Hopefully, this will not lead to dodgy pet policies, educational or otherwise, being nodded through with insufficient challenge, accompanied by the odd wink across the floor, and a slap on the back on the way out for putting those pesky spanner-throwers back in their boxes.

So much for all those manifestos pledging to end this kind of tribal politics – we need only look a few thousand miles to the west if we want to see the sort of division with which we’ll end up if we carry on much further down this path.

DAVE HERSCHEL