Last week, like a docile river bracing itself to receive the anticipated flood of winter rains, Guernsey’s political year meandered its sluggish, largely unruffled course through its last calendar month, only briefly washing against a short murky stretch of riverbank, via a States meeting that required little more than two hours to complete.
Given that Guernsey has no rivers to speak of, perhaps my metaphor should have been one of a neap tide quietly ebbing its retreat across gently sloping sands and a small but ugly patch of messy rocks towards the low-water mark, there to enjoy the brief calm of slack water whilst preparing for the spring-tide gales to come.
Whatever the metaphor, the Assembly of last week was not fertile ground for a parliamentary sketch writer. Not that it mattered much since there has been plenty going on across the wider political scene. No, I’m not referring to the Le Tocq saga but to some of the relative trivia that, taken together, tell us much about the current Assembly. It was Virginia Woolf who wrote to the effect that we are mistaken to think that great things are more significant than little things. She was right. More of that later. But first let’s look back on the meagre offerings of last week’s meeting.
Routine updates from the presidents of Employment & Social Security and Home Affairs provided an informative and uneventful prelude to a question time of varied character.
My mention above of a murky stretch of riverbank and ugly rocks was prompted by the first set of questions that followed. Yet again, the Assembly was the setting for the long-running saga of St Pier versus the medical establishment. I reckon we are now on episode one of the third series. I take no sides and don’t doubt that there are serious issues at stake, but I do question whether they need to be resolved via Netflix in the Assembly. It left me disappointed. I may have been alone in detecting a whiff of revenge, even vindictiveness, in the air and in wondering about proportionality. There was mention of families in terror. Two thoughts came to mind.
In my book, the word ‘terror’ is absolute and not relative. Fear, stress and anxiety can be relative, but terror is either terror or is not. To be topical, picture that young mother clutching her child, stranded in the open at Bondi Beach amongst the dead and dying, sensing the sniper’s sights seeking her out. Now that was real terror. And the second thought? Even the strongest argument undermines itself by resort to hyperbole.
As I listened, I felt not a little worried that the matter risked poisoning the atmosphere in the new Assembly, the potential for which was evidenced by Deputy McKenna’s intemperate intervention. In welcome contrast, Deputy Oswald, responding as president of Health & Social Care, was measured, clear, constructive and non-confrontational. His handling of the session impressed me and left me thinking that the leadership of HSC is in decent hands.
All this gave certain members time to think how they might distract me with some potential sketch material. Not that it amounted to much.
Deputy Sloan threw a few darts at Guernsey Finance. None hit the bull’s eye but he got close enough to leave the promotional arm of our finance industry with the uncomfortable sense that the high priest of States scrutiny has it in his sights.
Deputy Gollop asked the president of Housing, Deputy Williams, inter alia what his committee was doing to improve accommodation for our young sofa surfers. Irony alert! I wondered what he had in mind; perhaps a few Goyas on the walls, Kashmir carpets and a jacuzzi? I waited in vain for even a hint of recognition by anyone that our sofa-hopping nomads and their families might have just the teeny-weeniest responsibility to sort themselves out rather that look to our government to do it for them.
Those who have their doubts about over-reliance on AI would have had their scepticism reinforced by a question from Deputy Ozanne. The AI dictionary tells us that there are six categories of poverty, but none of them includes one she has discovered, namely funeral poverty. Whatever next?! She claimed it’s getting worse and would get even worser if P&R went ahead and increased the cost of a death certificate. She offered no evidence to support her claim that dispatching grandpa is more impoverishing than it ever was, but this close to my 85th birthday, I’m grateful that her intervention has encouraged me to put some extra money aside, just in case.
Poor old Deputy Blin! Question time isn’t his comfort zone. There are two simple rules for question time: ask a question; and do it within one minute. His usual problem is the one-minute bit. This time, he managed to stand and sit in time but forgot to ask a question. The Bailiff did well to hide his irritation – almost.
So, what about Virginia Woolf’s little things that matter? Here’s one example. The trial of Deputy St Pier by the Commissioner for Standards and his subsequent retrial by his parliamentary colleagues was the ‘big thing’ in the world of code of conduct complaints, but I found a lesser case to be just as informative — and even more persuasive when it came to answering the question ‘so what?’
Shock horror! In an email, Deputy Leadbeater had referred to Deputy Inder as ‘a prick’. Medals have been awarded for less.
Deputy Leadbeater had offered an apology which Deputy Inder had accepted with good grace. And yet, Deputy Rochester had thought it necessary to intervene by making a code of conduct complaint against Deputy Leadbeater. As Will Shakespeare would’ve put it, ‘the lady doth protest too much, methinks’. I bet that Deputy Inder was less offended by being laddishly labelled a prick than he was by the suggestion that he needed looking after by Deputy Rochester. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of bloke who would take well to having a minder.
You may ask, so what? I’ll tell you. Let it remain a mystery why the otherwise admirable Deputy Rochester concluded that the code of conduct system was meant for such trivial matters, but mystery or not, it was more instrumental than the St Pier case in convincing me that there should be absolutely no mechanism at all by which anybody, politician or non-politician, can make a formal complaint against anything a serving deputy does, writes or says. It’s one thing for a charitably-minded deputy to simply misjudge the purpose of the code of conduct system – in my view a misjudgement shared by the Commissioner herself in this particular case – quite another when mischievous members are tempted to exploit the procedure’s potential vulnerability to being malignly weaponised, as has been witnessed in recent years.
In the good old days (before 2006), our elected representatives could say, write or do anything within the law and it broadly worked because the court of public opinion and the need to be respected by working colleagues were sufficient informal forces for restraint and acceptable ethical standards. Perhaps paradoxically, the very freedom enjoyed by deputies and conseillers had the effect of deterring abuse of it and encouraging self discipline. We should revisit those days.
I offer a second example of how the ‘little things’ can prove to be significant. Whilst the Le Tocq affair is in itself truly shocking and important, the political outcome in terms of what, if anything, to do about replacing the former deputy is relatively small beer in amongst the immense issues that face our government. And yet, some deputies and a few members of the public are getting all steamed up about it. It smacks of an Assembly already experiencing frustration and desperately seeking something to get worked up about, almost as a distraction from all the genuinely ‘big things’ that are queuing up for attention and resolution.
It’s worth pausing a while to answer those who maintain that we have more than enough deputies to provide efficient government, and that the loss of just one for an entire political term is easily covered. This argument rarely comes from within the ranks of those who have themselves wielded pick and shovel at the coal face of government service. Consider this: up until 2000, there were 55 States members (33 deputies, 12 conseillers and 10 douzaine representatives) sharing the collective political workload; by 2004, 45 deputies governed us, the office of conseiller having been abolished in 2000 and the douzaine representatives removed in 2004; and by 2016 the number of politicians had been reduced still further to the current 38. Jersey has 49, by the way. Over those 25 years, has the political workload diminished commensurately? I don’t know, but I doubt it has. And here’s a mischievous thought: the prime agitator for preventing a by-election next year is Deputy Laine, who last served in government 2008-12 as one of 45 deputies. Did he, I wonder, during his time ever propose reducing the number to 38 on the basis that there was so much slack in the system?
I’m not particularly fussed about whether a by-election is held or not, but the issue has prompted a few further thoughts. I’m intrigued, for example, that those deputies opposed to holding a by-election are effectively arguing that paying each of them an annual salary of £49,151 represents such poor value for the taxpayer’s money that nobody will miss any of them if they drop out. An observer less charitable than me might find that an illuminating confession by these members of their own worthlessness. Of course, they go on to argue that there are enough of them to rally round and gallantly shoulder the extra burden.
But this is the point where a ‘little thing’ starts to grow into something bigger because the inconvenient truth is that there aren’t enough of them. Because they are already covering for too many members who simply aren’t pulling their weight; too many riding the political bus as non-fare-paying passengers; to put it bluntly, too many doing little or nothing more than serving as voting fodder, or in one case as non-voting fodder. Their frustrated, hard-working colleagues tell me that they are reluctant to publicly expose these shirkers and would feel uncomfortable to do so. I understand their reluctance, but I don’t need to share it. So here goes! Readers of a nervous disposition are advised to boil a kettle and make themselves a cup of tea.
Under the parish-based election system, a significant element in an elected deputy’s commitments used to be that of time-consuming but highly rewarding personal engagement with constituents. Island-wide voting has all but banished that element to the past. We now look to our deputies to represent us principally through their active and productive membership of government committees and of the States of Deliberation.
With that concept of local democracy in mind, I have my beady eye on at least three deputies. I’ve seen no evidence that one of them does anything more than attend States meetings and ask Rule 14 questions. This deputy does no committee work, not through having stood unsuccessfully for committee membership but through having intentionally avoided it like the plague. In my view, this approach to political service effectively reduces the role of a deputy to that of a consultant who charges the taxpayer a fee for asking questions, in this case at £4,951.10p a pop (six months’ salary divided by the number of Rule 14 questions asked since the general election). Not to mention the cost in terms of civil service time spent in providing the answers. Rule 14 questions have a useful place in a politician’s toolbox, but most deputies manage to ask them whilst doing piles of useful work elsewhere. Asking these questions isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a full-time occupation. Besides, call me old-fashioned, but I’ve always believed that we elect and pay our deputies to provide answers and solutions rather than simply ask questions which we could easily ask ourselves.
My impeccable sources tell me that another deputy who is a member of two principal committees has missed some meetings of those committees because of commitments to paid employment in the private sector. I remember – from my time as a non-States member of the Island Development Committee long ago – a certain deputy who gave similar priority to attendance on the golf course at L’Ancresse over meetings of the committee. I thought those days had gone.
A third deputy offers the taxpayer no more than attendance at States meetings and membership of an obscure sub-committee that has met only twice since the general election and has yet to offer even a hint of an update on what it is doing. Nice earner if you can get it, eh?
In my view, the taxpayer has a right to expect more from second-term deputies whose political apprenticeship served during the previous term should have prepared them for more productive and industrious efforts on our behalf.
There are others about whose commitment to our government’s work I have doubts. Judging from the apparent distance between their noses and the grindstone, I suspect that one or two regard passive membership of committees and mute attendance at meetings as sufficient to justify their salary. I call it simply going through the motions. Another seems to be treating the privilege of States membership as a self-serving public platform on which to act out an obsessive, personal agenda.
The deputies I have in mind are known to their colleagues, but I wonder if they, themselves, recognise their own inadequacies. In a perfect world, they would consult their conscience and ask themselves if they are truly providing the taxpayer with value for money and doing full justice to their elected role. Just imagine, if they were honest with themselves, they would answer ‘no’ and do the honourable thing by making way for those who would be able to answer ‘yes’. In which case we could have a by-election for four or five or six vacancies rather than just one. Now that would be worth the cost and the trouble, wouldn’t it?
As I said, little things can lead to big things. Happy Christmas!
