Updates, obfuscation and ormers

GETTING back in control of the Covid-19 virus and thereby easing our way out of the current lockdown is what matters by far the most just now and it behoves us all – whether politicians, the community writ large or occasional column-writers – to do nothing to impede those who bear key responsibilities for dealing with the pandemic.

That said, it is not the only thing that matters. Other urgent issues of government are active and they won’t be resolved or simply go away if they are shoved to one side for fear of rocking the Covid-19 boat.

With that in mind, it was entirely proper that the virtual States meeting held this week comprised an agenda that included not only the routine statements that allow committee presidents, at regular intervals, to update the Assembly and then be questioned, but also another time-consuming session during which the presidents of States bodies address questions previously submitted in writing by individual States members under Rule of Procedure 11. These are valuable parliamentary devices that enable States members to hold government publicly to account. By the same token, political sketch-writers such as myself should not feel inhibited from commenting on how those presidents respond to being held to account in this way in the Assembly and what sort of a fist the members make of their role as questioners.

The two updates delivered by Deputy Soulsby on behalf of P&R and by Deputy Prow as Home Affairs president offered more words about action yet to come, and I for one consider it would have been unreasonable to expect more at this early stage. Actions taken without the due input of thought and word would be dangerously reckless actions. As for the States’ future strategy, Deputy Soulsby advocated four guidelines. The States should act decisively in unison; seek impact and value for money; display agility; and act responsibly. I think she may be pushing at an open door because there can’t be too many deputies wishing for a divided States that is indecisive, wasteful, ponderous and irresponsible. She confirmed that the first policy letter for the Government Work Plan will be debated in mid-March with the necessary funding being proposed in a July policy letter.

Deputy Prow informed the Assembly that Home Affairs had established four policy priorities. These had all been identified as objectives by the previous committee of which he and I were members for three years. We had failed to resolve them so I wish him success in securing from P&R the resources necessary to achieve these objectives this time around.

One objective is to ensure readiness for the 2023 Moneyval inspection of our effectiveness in fighting financial crime and the financing of terrorism, which prompts me to note that it was Deputies Helyar on behalf of P&R and Moakes on behalf of Economic Development who led on the proposal to introduce a new Credit and Finance Law. Had I still been a States member, and with Moneyval 2023 in mind, I would have supported this proposed new legislation unreservedly, but Deputy Gollop had spotted the same irony as I had, namely that it was proposed by two members of the Guernsey Party whose election platform was one of less government interference in business, not more. It was especially rich that Deputy Moakes, whose manifesto in October last year demanded less ‘regulation, bureaucracy and red-tape’, chose – only four months later – to devote his maiden speech (yes, you’ve guessed it) to introducing more legislation, bureaucracy and red-tape. Welcome to the realities of government.

Deputy Burford had submitted four Rule 11 questions to the ESC president, three of which were essentially seeking assurance from Deputy Dudley-Owen that the review of secondary education was being carried out in conformity with her very own successful ‘pause and review’ requete of the previous year. In other words, we have had the ‘pause’ bit, are we getting the promised ‘review’ bit? The ESC president’s previous form suggested that she would respond to any challenging questions by answering entirely different, easier questions, but lo and behold, she had clearly decided to introduce an entirely novel approach to Rule 11 questions; she simply refused to answer them. The ESC president was adamant that access to information about the review was not for mere States members but was a private matter that should be reserved to those she kept referring to as ‘key stakeholders’, a mysterious membership which – it became clear – extended no further than to the teachers’ and lecturers’ unions. It certainly didn’t seem to include students whose future education is at stake, nor their parents and grandparents who presumably have a stake in all this, nor the general public who as taxpayers will have to foot the bill for whatever emerges from the review, and certainly not democratically-elected States members hoping to make evidence-based decisions on an issue of vital interest to just about everyone.

Deputy Burford was not alone in wanting answers; deputy after deputy tried to penetrate the ESC president’s shield against the arrows of openness and transparency, but to no avail, they met the same, robotic response that would have delighted Ivan Pavlov himself. Such control-freakery may be part and parcel of life in Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea but it is a bad fit in open democracies such as ours. In my experience, such excessive caginess and strict information management are sure signs of insecurity and lack of confidence, which do not bode well for the review’s outcome.

By way of a brutal contrast, Deputy Roffey provided a masterclass of a committee president confidently on top of his brief when responding both to Rule 11 questions and without a pre-written script to supplementaries. As STSB president, he was challenged variously – by Deputies De Lisle, Falla and Le Tissier – about the health of the Fort George outflow, the system for screening and handling outward-bound hold luggage at the airport and the disposal by auction of States-owned vehicles. Whether imparting good news or bad, or simply admitting that he didn’t have the answer to every single one of the many supplementary questions, Deputy Roffey offered a welcome combination of clarity and disarming frankness. He can also wield the knife, as we saw when he warned Deputy St Pier to keep government hands off Guernsey Post’s investment capital.

Sandwiched between these two sessions of Rule 11 questions, Deputy De Sausmarez did her best to answer questions on the sex life of our ormers. Essentially Deputy Burford wanted to know if it was lively enough to keep up with our voracious appetite for eating its offspring. The E&I president was handicapped by the fact that nobody, including her committee, knows the answer. Deputy De Sausmarez could have curtailed the session by following the example of the ESC president and insist that she couldn’t answer the questions until due consultation had been completed with the key stakeholders, in this case the ormers. But she didn’t, so we were condemned to a seemingly endless queue of deputies asking questions to which there could be no answer. Amongst them was Deputy Taylor who, with a cavalier disregard for altruism which I hope is untypical of other young members of the Assembly, wished extinction on the ormer population purely on the basis that he personally dislikes the taste of them. Curiously silent were Deputy Trott, whose enthusiasm for ormer gathering is legendary, and Deputy Helyar, who in a former career had the job of inspecting the size of Deputy Trott’s molluscs. When all was finally said, rarely can so many words have been uttered in any Assembly without any effect whatsoever.

Away from the Assembly, I note that the Guernsey branch of the Institute of Directors is beside itself in its admiration of the achievements of the new States in its first 100 days. The Institute is, of course, entitled to its opinion but that entitlement does not extend to unchallenged ownership of the facts. Its vice-chairman has attributed our part in the successful (is it really?) UK/EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement as an example of our new government’s slogan of ‘action not words’ actually bearing fruit. Really? The facts are that our current government contributed precious little, if anything at all, to the settlement of the terms which will define the UK’s – and therefore our Bailiwick’s – relationship with the EU following Brexit. To suggest that during last November and December our brand new government somehow managed to broker the post-Brexit arrangements is manifest nonsense; all the hard graft and intelligence applied to securing the protection of Bailiwick interests was provided by a previous team of politicians and civil servants over the four years following the June 2016 UK referendum. All that the current States did was to meet on 27 December and do what it had no alternative to doing, namely agree to extend the TCA terms, whether good or not so good, to these islands.

Finally, we should note that the self-styled god Jupiter – aka French President Macron – has been indulging in some Trump-like fake news, putting it about that the Oxford-Astrazenica vaccine doesn’t work for the over-65s whilst at the same time complaining that France can’t get enough of it. Strange bloke. We should not allow this to provoke us into gloating about the complete mess that the EU Commission has made of the EU’s Covid-19 vaccination programme. Rather, we should sympathise with the 27 countries of the EU who foolishly allowed the Commission to take sole responsibility for the procurement and allocation of vaccines only to find that it has left them practically bereft of the precious stuff just when they need it most.

Just think back to last July when all those dewy-eyed, Europhile Remainers criticized the UK government for declining to join the EU procurement programme, characterising it as typical Brexiteer delusion about sovereignty; if they had had their way our Bailiwick’s allocation of 0.1 percent of the UK availability of vaccines would now be 0.1 percent of next to nothing.