Richard Graham: Messy episodes in the Assembly

As I’ve commented elsewhere*, the approaching end of the calendar year sees the new Assembly still in its political nappies but edging close to being potty-trained. I know, you’re finding it a challenge to picture some of our elected representatives in rompers. But keep at it. Potty-training is a notoriously dodgy but necessary process in growing up, but it really is time for members to move on from taking those first wobbly, rubber-legged steps in the new life of a fresh Assembly and to get on with making things happen, all the time aware that messy accidents can, and almost certainly will, happen along the way.

As they did at last week’s meeting.

The meeting began in a mood of almost dystopian gloom. All that was missing was thunder and lightning and a bit of Wagner played loud. Step forward Wagner’s heroic Siegfried in the person of Deputy St Pier to declare that oodles of States cash, around £42m. of it, had effectively been flushed down the loo to no purpose. Not only had the States’ reckless, ruinous dash for digital transformation failed to make government more efficient, it had also made every service that had previously worked well fail completely. Not to put too fine a point on it, virtually every government service that involved someone using a computer somewhere along the line was now in a state for which even the vocabulary of a Bermondsey stevedore experiencing a bad day couldn’t find words. Why this news came as a shock to anyone is beyond me. Never in the history of mankind, anywhere in the world, has any government’s brave-new-world, computer-driven transformation plans failed to fail. Why we (including me) keep falling for the insanely optimistic promises made for such initiatives is hard to explain, except that I suppose we always think that the next one might just be the very first ever to work.

Deputy Oswald’s update as Health & Social Care president offered one item of good news. Apparently, the electronic patients records programme was at last making progress. I keep asking, in vain, for information about these electronic patients. What are their symptoms? Are they contagious? Is there a cure? How many of them are there? There must be hundreds if keeping their records is such a problem. We should be told.

Deputy Ozanne having made an early exit from membership of Education, Sport & Culture, a replacement had to be found. As ESC president, Deputy Montague made the obligatory, heroic effort to present his nomination, Deputy Curgenven, as the dream candidate. Deputy Helyar thought the committee would be better served by his nomination of Alderney Representative Hill, a welcome polymathic gift to the Assembly from the northern isle. I would have voted for Alderney’s version of Renaissance Man, but only 17 members agreed with me. I was left wondering, mischievously, how ESC members had voted in the privacy of a secret ballot.

Oh dear. The rest was all too predictable. I’d hoped – reckless believer in humanity’s good sense that I am – that the trial of Deputy St Pier would avoid the potential mess which circumstances had conspired to dangle so temptingly in front of his parliamentary colleagues; that members would rise above the snarls and petty jealousies that had infected the lifeblood of their immediate predecessors. ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ Hamlet was right; life simply isn’t about making idle dreams like mine come true.

I don’t intend to express a view on the merits or otherwise of the case against Deputy St Pier. I simply don’t have the facts to make a judgement, and even if I did, my parliamentary sketch isn’t the place for me to make it known. There are, though, two aspects of the affair which simply demand a mention.

The first is the role played by the ‘medical establishment’ in the form of the British Medical Association. The doctors I’ve come across in my long life have been admirable members of a noble profession, but the antics of the BMA in publicly baying for Deputy St Pier’s blood have been unedifying and highly questionable. I found particularly nauseating the organisation’s hypocrisy of on the one hand pleading the cause of the sick in order to put pressure on States members, whilst on the other having offered consistent evidence that the BMA, as an institution, views harming the sick as the acceptable – even intentional – collateral damage that its members cause each time they go on official strike in the UK (13 strike actions since March 2023, countless appointments cancelled, treatments missed and operations postponed). Whatever happened to the Hippocratic Oath? Don’t they swear it anymore? And if they do, do they simply cross their fingers behind their back when doing so?

The second troubling aspect of the matter concerns the principle that lies at the heart of our current system for regulating the conduct of our politicians; namely that they should themselves have the final, decisive role in judging the conduct of one of their fellow members and in setting punishment when appropriate. I don’t agree with that principle. It asks too much of the conventional setting of a States meeting and of the necessary impartiality of those in attendance. A meeting of the States of Deliberation is not a court, and those present are not disinterested jurors. If there is to be a commissioner for standards, backed by an appeals commissioner, then let them do their job. Let them feel and carry the full weight of responsibility for the complete process. Let them pronounce and not merely advise. I concede that no commissioner can be assumed to be infallible, but in my view the risk of a questionable judgement is more acceptable than requiring Assembly members to judge and sentence one of their own.

But that is not the process which the current Assembly has inherited, like it or not. If evidence to support my view of the system was needed, it was provided by one argument that ran through the debate, namely that for the Assembly to do anything other than support the independent commissioners would not only negate the validity of the process established to resolve such matters but would also undermine the integrity and competence of the commissioners themselves who might well say ‘sod this for a game of soldiers, I’m off’. But here’s the thing: if the role of the Assembly is intended to be strictly confined to rubber-stamping the commissioners’ findings and recommendations with absolutely no room for variation of any kind, why in the first case give the Assembly any role at all? But here’s the contrary and awkward thing: the system has intentionally given members the role of making the final judgement themselves, so why not let them? Tricky, eh?

The Assembly had the opportunity to deal with this awkward process in a grown-up manner. By that I mean that the States Assembly and Constitution Committee president could have simply laid the report with a brief, neutral summary of the two commissioners’ findings and recommendations whilst eschewing additional commentary. She didn’t. Deputy St Pier could then have been invited to make his case, following which the Assembly could have gone straight to the vote, thereby avoiding the all-too-predictable outcome whenever members are presented with an irresistible temptation to erect their own rhetorical pillars of rectitude and in some cases give vent to personal animus.

Sadly, the grown-ups of my imagination were in short supply. Deputy McKenna was quick to set the tone. He seemed to be under two assumptions: first, that the Assembly was indeed constituted as a court, convened to conduct a retrial; second, that no-one else had read the commissioner’s report. How else to explain why he felt it necessary to use his speech to read out the report to members, page by laborious page? In a voice thickly coated with self-righteousness, he droned on and on as he conducted his own vengeful repeat of Deputy St Pier’s trial, seemingly as a self-appointed prosecutor representing the medical establishment. From its place on my bookshelf, my copy of J’Accuse, Emile Zola’s masterpiece about the notorious Dreyfus affair, looked down on me, knowingly.

In next to no time, the Assembly’s airspace resembled Heathrow on a busy day. A fly couldn’t move without colliding with a swarm of glowing halos that buzzed here and there like beatific drones trailing proud symbols of political chastity. None shone brighter than that of Deputy Inder who had graciously, even selflessly, made himself present for the occasion between frequent breaks outside. He had plenty to say. I couldn’t understand all of it. In the previous political term he once accused former Deputy Meerveld of mumbling during one of their many entertaining playground spats. At the time, I thought the accusation was a bit rich, coming from the Assembly’s mumbler-in-chief; a bit unkind, too, since an unwell Deputy Meerveld was wearing a mask at the time. Last week, from what I could understand of the sanctimonious sermon mumbled by Deputy Inder from the high pulpit to which he has recently been re-elevated, he was outraged that Deputy St Pier’s conduct had fallen well below the standards that were so dear to him personally and to his colleagues; he had let them all down and should be punished. Survivors from the two previous political terms shared with Deputy Inder will have listened to this with wry curiosity. I could swear that I heard one of them mutter ‘pass me the sick bucket’.

There was an inevitable sameness about contributions to the debate. In some way or other, all members declared themselves uncomfortable at being obliged to debate the issue (they weren’t of course obliged to debate it at all) and acknowledged their duty to observe the highest of standards when conducting themselves as our elected representatives. What else could they have said?

If ever a microphone can be described as looking nervous, it’s likely to be Deputy Goy’s. It’s in instant peril of disembowelment the moment he stands and gets into his arm-waving, low-hover posture to speak. He offered an original thought as a balance to the prevailing view that it was all about deputies not abusing their privileged position. Members were indeed privileged when speaking in the Assembly, he observed, but outside the Assembly they had far less freedom than members of the public.

Looking back on the debate, I draw one welcome consolation. It had been conducted in a measured tone that would’ve been beyond the reach of the predecessor Assembly’s culture. Lapses into personality politics had been few and mild in nature and in every case had been imported by survivors from the last political term. Well done the newbies. The Deputy Bailiff, too, deserves credit for the light but firm touch with which she presides over meetings; she keeps things moving and encourages a constructive response and a welcome sense of collective camaraderie. When occasionally addressed as ‘Sir’, just the hint of a disapproving wince is usually enough to make her point. Her patience is long but not infinite and is being thoroughly tested by some members who simply cannot cope with the concept of addressing other members through the presiding officer or with the need to avoid mentioning non-members by name. Towards the end of last week’s debate, she may well have concluded that the current colony – likeable parliamentary company as they are – aren’t yet the brightest bunnies in the warren. Which brings us neatly back to potty-training.

* Now on sale, with proceeds to Guernsey Motor Neurone.