As an ordinary taxpayer and islander, you’ve had a tough time. Your income, in real terms, has declined as the economy has stagnated while prices rocketed and house costs and rents would have become a joke, if only it wasn’t happening to you.
On top of that, you’ve had a rapacious government that has been so useless – and we’ll come on to that shortly – it demanded more and more money from you so it could continue to make the same mistakes that have got us to this state in the first place.
If only there was a solution. Cue the president of Policy & Resources. We were thankfully spared the wand and unicorn, but tax reforms, fiscal frameworks and something called priority-based budgeting will put everything right. Hurrah.
And this States sorcery will do so by taking yet more money off you while simultaneously making anyone earning under £50k a year – including some deputies – better off while turning government into a beacon of rectitude and frugality.
So should you have any faith that P&R, having in its various iterations got us into this mess in the first place, will now get us out again?
I was going to walk you through a measured assessment of the ifs and buts and whys and wherefores to help you reach your own conclusion on this vital question. But frankly, there isn’t time because we have now entered an era of States’ Newspeak.
To remind you, that featured in George Orwell’s novel 1984, as a form of language designed by a state to limit free thought, reduce vocabulary and eliminate the possibility of anti-government concepts (thoughtcrime).
Deputy de Sausmarez’s statement to the Assembly last week was larded with it, especially over the IT debacle that’s cost £42m. but just as magically was never directly the States’ fault. Hence this from P&R:
Newspeak – ‘While appropriate financial controls had been set within the organisation, they were not always effective because they were frequently not followed.’
Meaning – we controlled nothing.
Newspeak – ‘External suppliers failed to meet agreed deliverables, and there was no sufficiently robust mechanism to ensure that they did.’
Meaning – we watched while they robbed us.
Newspeak – ‘Concerns raised about the project were not addressed adequately or in a timely manner.’
Meaning – robbery became a spectator sport.
Newspeak – ‘There was a significant disparity between how the project’s status was reported (including to politicians) and the reality of its progress.’
Meaning – we pretended everything was fine.
What she should have said was that this was a disaster from start to finish. The IT providers weren’t properly briefed on requirements, or adequately challenged to ensure what was needed was actually delivered, but we paid them anyway. That those charged with oversight were either so incompetent or deceitful that they covered up the extent of this total failure and may even have lied.
My last column about the crisis of management within the States was totally exonerated and confirmed by her statement – but the president never directly acknowledged the extent of the failure. Newspeak 1, truth and honesty 0.
Be under no illusion. What the IT fiasco really shows is an institutional inability to function, to manage money, to know what it wants or needs and ensure that it pays only on delivery.
But you got none of that from Deputy de Sausmarez. Instead, it was as though she was trying to spare the guilty from feeling remorse, to protect you, the taxpayer, from the realisation that you can’t trust the States with your money.
Coincidentally, Scrutiny Management had its moment in the sun too, with its president also providing an update statement. Oh dear. Someone else spotted Newspeak as well and called it out:
‘Across multiple areas, Scrutiny has encountered an authoritative, bureaucratic and statist culture. Too often, producer rather than public interests dominate – where what is best for an organisation is assumed to be what is best for Guernsey – which is a culture we need to rectify,’ Deputy Andy Sloan told the House.
He has his work cut out. Why? Because Scrutiny exists to improve the quality of policy, governance, accountability and outcomes, and to ensure public resources are being used effectively and for their intended purpose.
In short, everything that the IT debacle shows the States doesn’t do, while Deputy de Sausmarez’ Newspeak statement showed how strong the desire to downplay reality remains.
As Deputy Sloan told the Assembly, ‘...the SMC wrote to all principal committees proposing a practical and proportionate approach to pre-decision scrutiny. The response we received, via Policy & Resources, was in effect a polite refusal.’
What this means is from P&R down, committees pay lip service to openness, transparency and accountability but, when it comes to it, can’t bear challenge or scrutiny.
Too harsh an assessment? Well, how about this? There’s something called the Leale’s Yard Political Oversight Group and SMC struggled to be permitted a copy of its terms of reference. These, for reasons that escapes everyone, are allegedly confidential.
As Deputy Sloan said, that secrecy is difficult to justify given their largely procedural nature and ‘reflects a default tendency to restrict information rather than publish it. More substantively, they offer limited clarity on decision-making authority, accountability, escalation, or how costs, risks and delivery options are to be robustly tested.’
Yes, just as we promise openness and transparency post IT foul-up, we’re back laying it on with a trowel. To cement the new era of Newspeak, the P&R president also berated Deputy Sloan for allegedly bringing back the toxic culture of the previous Assembly.
His crime? Highlighting the absurdity of an oversight – oversight! – board’s terms of reference being too secret to share with islanders. In other words, the very people for whom it was supposedly oversighting.
The other development that highlights how grave the situation is for the credibility of the island’s government came from accountant Richard Hemans, noted for his forensic commentaries.
He has pointed out that crucial national statistics on gross domestic product, employment, population and earnings have not been published, and no timetable has been set for their return, leaving government navigating blind.
‘The blackout extends beyond output. Population data, which is vital in a small, ageing island with a low birth rate and a tight labour market, is also missing. Without clarity on workforce size, labour-market participation or dependency ratios, even the most basic assumptions underpinning fiscal and economic policy are open to question,’ he said.
So not only is Guernsey in the dark, P&R is quite happy to keep it that way. As with Newspeak, it’s so much easier to introduce GST if no one really knows what government is doing or saying.
