Richard Graham: The wrong target?

A handful of readers may have led such sheltered lives that they’ve yet to come across Zeno’s dichotomy paradox, so for their benefit I will do my best to explain.

Zeno was a Greek bloke who lived between 490 and 430BC. Let’s call him a deep-thinking, innovative philosopher. You know the sort – the States Assembly is full of them. Zeno proposed several paradoxes concerning the relationship between time, space and motion. Each paradox involved demonstrating that phenomena we know to be true simply can’t be true. I over-simplify, but that was their gist.

Here’s an example. If I place a target eight yards away from me and fire an arrow at it, I know that if my aim is good and my pull strong enough, the arrow will find the target. Not so, said Zeno. The arrow will never get there because it’s on an infinite journey. Hence its relevance to our beloved States on its own infinite journey. Back to the arrow. Halfway along its journey, the arrow will still have four yards to go. Move it on by half of the remaining distance and it will have two yards to travel. Another half will leave it three feet short. Eventually, the arrow will get pretty close. Let’s say an inch. But halfway across the remaining distance it will still have half an inch to travel, and then a quarter, and an eighth and a sixteenth and so on, literally ad infinitum. There’ll always be a distance, no matter how tiny, between the arrow and the target. So said Zeno. His friends nodded their heads sagely in agreement but, curiously, none was so convinced as to volunteer to be the target of the arrow so that he could prove his point.

On 24 October, Deputy Parkinson reached into his quiver and fired a sharp arrow in the form of a motion of no confidence directed at Policy & Resources Committee. In the subsequent seven weeks he must have doubted whether his arrow, like Zeno’s, would ever reach its target. The Assembly hardly helped it on its way. Members spent an entire day in late November without reaching a conclusion. Hardly surprising when the four members of the White Van Non-Party alone spoke for a total of 2 hours 10 minutes between them. If it wasn’t filibustering, it rather sounded like it.

Last week, the honour of resuming the debate after a two-week break went to Deputy Oliver. She began with a volley of ums and ers so prolific that for a moment I thought she’d decided to address the Assembly in Swahili, but once I had tuned in to her unique style of delivery, her message became clear. She would have no truck with any attempt to unseat P&R. If P&R had achieved next to nothing, its members weren’t to blame; it was the fault of all those rules and processes that prevented anything from being done. Clearly, she didn’t like rules and processes, which must be a bit tricky for her since she is president of the Development & Planning Authority whose mission in life is to ensure that members of the public follow its countless rules and processes.

Subsequent speeches never reached the same level of exotic entertainment. Deputy Murray was Deputy Murray for a half an hour or so – it felt much longer – but eventually gave way so that Deputies Taylor and Ferbrache could throw blunt darts at each other for a mercifully short time. Deputy Aldwell seemed to think that P&R were a simply wonderful bunch and that responsibility for all the faults of this political term lay elsewhere. Deputy McKenna wasn’t so sure. He’d been ambushed and hijacked by Deputy Aldwell’s loveable boys and still felt the bruises. In his inimitable folksy style he used a short story to tell members that if they wanted to know what true leadership was, they need look no further than their Lt-Governor. Deputy Blin explained that his lack of confidence in P&R wasn’t personal; it was purely a case of ‘wind farms over windbaggery’. A catchy strapline, eh?

Deputy Helyar signalled his resignation with a ‘farewell cruel world’ speech worthy of the Old Vic. It comprised two principal themes – defiant, lavish praise of himself and bilious bitterness at those who had stood in his way. I was genuinely saddened to listen as this hard-working member rejected the opportunity to make a dignified, statesmanlike and conciliatory exit from his three-year stint in a highly demanding post. It prompted the thought that he and Deputy Mahoney haven’t been the first new members, nor will they be the last, to arrive from the business community and then be promoted above their limited political ceiling on the back of allegedly successful business careers, only to find that governing in a democracy is a darned sight more difficult than making money in the private sector.

The Parkinson arrow defied all attempts to deflect it from its path and, contrary to Zeno’s theory, duly struck P&R where it hurts just before lunch on the meeting’s first day.

Only Deputies Bury and Trott had chosen not to speak, content to let their votes speak for them rather than waste precious time explaining them. If only more members would do the same.

The outcome, 23-16 against P&R, defied predictions of a knife-edged vote. Deputy Kazantseva-Miller alone abstained, her thoughts possibly straying to the next-day’s elections for P&R membership.

The election of a new president and members to P&R told us a lot about the current Assembly. Four candidates stood for president. Three of them had supported the MONC. The 16 members who had opposed the MONC needed a candidate of their own. Anybody would do. They would have voted for Donald Duck if he’d been the only anti-MONC member available. As it happened, Deputy Prow stepped forward, encouraged by the knowledge that he had 16 votes already in the bag. In the circumstances, Deputy Trott did well to overcome an inbuilt deficit of 16 votes by attracting as many as 21 of the remaining 24 for himself.

Deputy Ferbrache marked his departure from P&R by nominating Deputy Gollop for membership of it. An interesting Parthian Shot. Was I alone in interpreting it as a spoiler, rather than as a magnanimous gesture in the interests of providing the Bailiwick with good government? After all, the former P&R president had declined two opportunities, in 2020 and 2022, to nominate Deputy Gollop for membership of his own P&R committee, but was now recommending him as a priceless asset to Deputy Trott’s committee. Intended spoiler or not, and in a clear sign that tribalism wasn’t dead, 16 other members dutifully joined him in spoiling Deputy Trott’s party by awarding more votes to Deputy Gollop than to either Deputies Soulsby, Parkinson or St Pier. Grotesque!

The consequences of the election don’t promise well for the prospects of effective government for the remainder of this political term. Two of the Assembly’s most talented members remain languishing as backbench castaways.

More damaging, Deputy Trott, partly of his own making, has been saddled with a P&R committee that is hopelessly out of step with most members.

Consider this – in recent weeks, a clear majority of members voted against the introduction of GST, rejected any suggestion of reckless, unfunded borrowing and demanded the removal of the former P&R committee. Yet somehow, they’ve elected a new P&R committee three of whose members (Deputies Gollop, Murray and Le Tocq) argued passionately for GST, voted recklessly for unfunded borrowing, and fought hard to keep the former P&R committee in place. So we now have a P&R committee with a built-in majority that is diametrically opposed to most members on these three fundamental issues. The balance is all wrong.

I’d only just begun to console myself with the thought that the new P&R president and vice-president might provide a beneficial – albeit minority – influence when things got even worse.

Forceful lobbying from an influential, special interest group presented an early first challenge to the new P&R’s responsibility for sound government finances. Faced with it, Deputies Trott and Soulsby completely bottled it. They joined fellow P&R member Deputy Gollop in supporting a populist motion from Deputy St Pier to prevent a steep rise in harbour mooring fees, a motion which if successful would have made States finances even worse than the sorry state we’d previously been told they were in. It seems that Deputy De Lisle’s Fiscally Bonkers Party has acquired unexpected new members. What’s more, a changed P&R committee has its own new mantra: ‘Crisis, what crisis?’

I see one ray of hope. Sufficient members in the Assembly could combine to limit the damage that this new, lopsided and unrepresentative P&R committee might inflict during the remainder of this political term. Mind you, that’s far from certain. I understand that two P&R members have been working on a revised system of government that would shift power away from the Assembly towards the centre.

So where does this change of P&R leave us? In my view we’ve simply sent Laurel and Hardy packing and replaced them with Abbott and Costello. Decidedly not funny.

And the arrow? It was left in pieces on the floor of the Assembly, waiting to be swept up and dumped. If it had been aimed at enhancing the government of these islands, perhaps Zeno was right after all. It never did reach its target.