Peter Roffey: ‘It’s not the system, it’s who’s working within it’

A group of men have published an open letter to the people of Guernsey calling for the island to adopt ‘executive government’.

They said they wanted islanders to vote – and to vote for those candidates backing executive government.

What the heck do they mean by that? Surely all government is executive government? In fact ‘exercising executive powers’ is pretty much a definition of the word ‘government’.

I am not setting out to be deliberately obtuse. Of course I know exactly what they mean. They mean that they want to see executive power vested in far fewer hands. The call is really for cabinet government rather than executive government. But why did they choose to shy away from the ‘c word’?

I think the answer is pretty obvious. They suspect many members of the Guernsey public harbour a deep suspicion of concentrating all of the powers of government in a cabinet. That they don’t want to see a small sub-section of deputies governing the community while the majority of deputies they’ve elected are in the States but not in government.

It gets worse, in my view, because lurking below the surface of calls for cabinet government is the fact that such a system can work well only if Guernsey fully embraces party politics. After all, a government which can’t rely on a majority in the parliament is regarded in the rest of the world as a classic lame duck government. Usually this would lead rapidly to a vote of no confidence.

The bland call for executive government is really a mask for both cabinet government and party politics. But would that really be so bad? After all, it is the way most of the rest of the world does it.

Well, they really have to do it that way. Can you imagine the UK parliament with 650 members acting as the policy-making body for the country, with every MP being a small part of government? Of course it couldn’t work, but there has to be some advantages to being a micro state.

I think one mistake many people make is in believing that the States of Deliberation – which recently some people prefer to call the States Assembly – carries out a similar function to parliaments elsewhere. It doesn’t. It’s nothing like that. In most countries, the parliament is simply the legislature. An incredibly important role of course, but nevertheless a limited one.

The House of Commons, for example, is not really a policy-making body. It can endorse or frustrate the policy agenda of the government by passing, rejecting or amending legislation, but the policies which engender that legislation in the first place are determined elsewhere.

Notwithstanding the occasional private member’s bill or opposition day motion, the stream of bills coming before parliament is overwhelmingly determined by the government, with the key policy planks being revealed in the king’s speech. The vast majority of MPs, whether they are in the governing party, or in one of the opposition parties, are most definitely not in government.

Guernsey’s parliament works very differently. Just like everywhere else, we have executive government, but here those executive powers are very diffuse. Every single deputy you elect serves in government.

The extent to which they each exercise those executive powers varies, simply because some of those powers are vested in the States of Deliberation itself, while others are delegated to its committees. Therefore, which committees a States member serves on influences the size of that member’s executive role. But the ultimate policy-making body is the States of Deliberation, and therefore no deputy is a backbencher. The normal use of the term backbencher makes zero sense within our system.

That is why the States spends only a minority of its time on the scrutiny of legislation, which would dominate the work of counterparts elsewhere.

Listen to a States meeting and you will hear that 90% of time is spent dealing with policy letters containing proposals from committees. Very little time is spent considering the laws which later flow from those policy decisions.

Effectively, States members get their chance to influence policy far further upstream than members of most parliaments, and therefore don’t have to rely on attempting to amend legislation late in the process in order to have any influence at all.

I far prefer our system to cabinet government. Particularly when you bear in mind that, because our parliament is so much smaller than most others, our cabinet would be also be proportionately smaller. All of the power would be vested in a tiny handful of deputies.

How would such a concentration of powers be characterised? I suspect the word would be ‘efficient’ if you happened to agree with that cadre’s policy agenda, but ‘utterly disastrous’ if you didn’t.

The clinching argument of those wanting to see Guernsey move to cabinet government is usually ‘What we have now isn’t working very well, so we have to change the system, or it will be the same-old, same-old’. Not only is this completely wrong, but it very much smacks of a bad workman blaming his tools.

I agree that the output of this States has been disappointing. But it is a huge leap of logic to suggest that must be because of a dysfunctional system of government. Isn’t it conceivable that the membership of the States is to blame rather than the system they work under? I suggest it’s not only conceivable but almost certainly the case.

My proof? Seeing several previous assemblies perform much better under exactly the same system. Many of them concentrated on trying to reach consensus, in order to make Guernsey’s government work, rather than wallowing in negativity, tribalism and aggression.

So am I saying nothing needs to change? Not necessarily. I could live with a slightly smaller States. Going from 40 members to 35 would probably mean most members needing to serve on at least two committees – a very good thing in my view.

More importantly, we now have an electoral system which almost guarantees that voters are utterly unable to make a proper appraisal of all of the candidates on offer.

But in the end it really comes down to having constructive, temperate and well-motivated deputies.

It isn’t the system which makes the real difference – it’s who is working within it.

We should remember that when we vote in June.

I agree with the group of businessmen behind the open letter to the extent that I really hope islanders will vote at the general election. But after that we rapidly part company.