Deputies have duty to challenge policy

Hands up if you understand the Bailiwick Blueprint for dealing with Covid-19, or, if you don’t, you at least know where to find and study it.

As I thought, most of you. Hands up those who are sure they know what the Blueprint is designed to achieve and to where it is meant to lead us. Mmm, not so many.

When the pandemic first hit us back in early 2020 it was relatively simple to understand what our objectives were. We needed to save lives and prevent the health services from being overwhelmed. Then, as weeks passed and we acquired the ability within our own resources to test, track, trace and isolate, the aim seemed to shift to one of total elimination of the virus. I don’t recall the Civil Contingencies Authority or the States collectively being that explicit, but that was widely accepted to be the case. By now, we are well on the way to offering almost the entire community a vaccine that by all accounts provides a high degree of protection against being infected by the virus and an even higher degree of protection against being made seriously ill or killed by it.

That being the case, what is the Bailiwick aim now? The Bailiwick Blueprint has a go at answering that question. It talks about reaching the stage when the virus is regarded as an endemic virus with which we have to learn to live, but it is unable to give us a picture of what the new norm will look like. Perhaps it is in the nature of the virus, whether pandemic or endemic, that clarity at this stage is either impossible or unwise, but I do wonder when and under what circumstances it will become both possible and wise to offer it. I was prompted to wonder about that when I heard that the majority of civil servants will be required to work from home for the indefinite future even though we have had weeks of no new cases and now have no known active cases. Just wondering.

I keep a small cardboard box into which I drop the names of new deputies who by what they say in the States merit recognition as assets who will strengthen the Assembly. It does not yet amount to a pile but it is slowly accumulating. I have now added Deputy Matthews to the contents of the box. He was one of four who made their maiden speech on the Bury/Gabriel amendment to the Government Work Plan and was, by a huge margin, in a class of his own amongst them. Although I didn’t agree with everything he said about education, I found myself thinking it is a pity he is not an ESC member, but judging from the qualities he revealed in his speech – an intelligent mind of his own and the ability to assess evidence – it is understandable that the ESC president declined to nominate him for membership.

It was mentioned in debate that ESC has published a document listing the four principles that guide the committee’s approach to a review of secondary education and that the principle of raising educational standards is not one of them; indeed it does not get even a mention.

This is an extraordinary omission, and last week it was the ESC members themselves who demonstrated why those standards need addressing urgently. The ESC president issued a media statement about the Bury/Gabriel amendment. Her statement referred to – and I quote directly – ‘the much-maligned two-school model’. I thought: ‘Crikey, the maligner-in-chief of the two-school model is repenting. Could it be that having spent most of the previous political term doing little else other than malign the model, she now admits it was all unfair?’

Sadly no. It turned out that neither the ESC president, nor presumably any of the ESC members who endorsed the statement, understood what the word ‘malign’ means. Either that or a Freudian slip.

I have previously mentioned that a lot of electoral snake oil was sold at the last general election. For those who like the stuff, I can now recommend an especially tasty brand marketed by Deputy Dyke. You get three flavours all in one bottle. For flavour one I quote from his election manifesto: ‘Each school should be run independent (sic) of the States with a Board of Governors and Headmaster in control of spending, hiring teaching staff and curriculum.’ (No place for female headteachers apparently.) Previously, he had publicly criticised the outgoing ESC for not achieving devolution of school governance during its first two years in office. He added a sprinkling of his second flavour through a promise to reduce the size and role of government and, once elected, he stirred in a third ingredient by embracing the mantras of ‘action this day’ and ‘action not words’.

But what’s this? Given the opportunity to vote for an amendment that would continue to commit the States to devolve school governance and thereby contribute to reducing the role of government and inject some degree of urgency into the process, he instead voted against it on the lame excuse that now was not the time. That is precisely what successive, over-cautious education authorities here have been saying in remembered time; for the timid, it never is the right time. Not so much a case of ‘action this day’ as ‘all words and no action at all’ during this States term.

With the Roffey/Le Tocq amendment defeated and the commitment to devolved governance deliberately removed, there is now no chance that governance will be devolved to any school or college governing bodies during this term. The shadow board of The Guernsey Institute, who in some form or another have been waiting powerless in the wings for far too long, might as well unpack their bags; they aren’t heading towards assuming their intended governance role anytime soon.

It is interesting to note how certain trends in social and cultural norms begin to appear in the States Assembly. One such is the concept of ‘personal truth’. What now appears to matter is ‘my truth’, ‘our truth’, ‘this or that group’s truth’; in other words, anything but the truth.

We had a touch of that during the debate on yet another example of this States’ appetite for increasing the role of government and adding more legislation, namely the introduction of a law that will criminalise the first purchase of fish landed by unlicensed fishermen.

The ED president referred to professional fishermen having gone round knocking on doors to sell their fish during last year’s lockdown. His words were useful to Deputy Roffey’s amendment, so he referred to them only a few minutes after they had been uttered. Lo and behold, up jumped the ED president to deny that he had ever used those words.

Oh dear, two conflicting truths. Deputy Roffey graciously accepted that he may possibly have misheard. But he hadn’t. The words were indeed on the record. So while the world has Meghan’s truth, Guernsey now has Neil’s truth. Needless to say, the amendment was lost, so the next time you are buying your Guernsey whiting don’t forget to ask to see an end-user certificate before you pay. You can’t be too careful these days.

Each States meeting can be guaranteed to produce its moments of humour, the best of them being either spontaneous or unintended. On cue, Deputy Queripel was deep into explaining his confusion over the debate of a policy letter when the Bailiff intervened to remark that it was not surprising he was confused because the States were debating an entirely different policy letter.

Deputy Queripel shouldn’t feel too bad about it; there but for the grace of God go many of us.

I close by observing that five months into the new political term the narrative and voting record of the Assembly already reflect two contrasting views on the democratic role of its members.

Around 15 members seem to recognise that they have both the duty and the privilege to scrutinise and challenge the policy letters of States committees on behalf of the wider community. Around 25 members have provided an alternative narrative, namely that such scrutiny and challenge are against the ‘Guernsey Together’ spirit, even that they are tantamount to treasonable declarations of mistrust in committees and inimical to our government’s prospects of bringing about a recovery from Covid-19 and Brexit.

I find the latter philosophy to be disturbingly close to the growing trend to ‘no-platform’ those who hold inconvenient views. If the community cannot rely on its elected representatives to challenge government for fear of being branded as traitorous troublemakers and sinister saboteurs of the common cause, on whom can they rely?

This columnist will continue to challenge and encourage without favour whenever challenge and encouragement are due.

By the way, the Government Work Plan was duly passed. I almost forgot. As did the Assembly, or so it seemed. In a three-day States meeting, members spent much less than two hours on general debate of the GWP late on Friday evening, almost as an afterthought and in what appeared to be a state of self-induced stupor. Perhaps like me, States members didn’t dwell on it because to be brutally frank it has virtually no chance of emerging intact from its first contact with reality. I can say that, but they couldn’t possibly.