I start with a health warning.
Although I never seek gratuitously to offend anyone reading my parliamentary sketches, I do occasionally cause offence. It goes with the territory, as they say. As I watch or listen to States meetings or observe some of the off-screen political shenanigans, my thoughts go racing off in spontaneous pursuit of images and words which, once captured, find themselves on my pages — fresh, pristine, untinkered and on clear display with nothing covering their nakedness. Inevitably this means that much of the stuff I write is by its very nature ‘iffy’. And let’s be honest, if blandness is ever allowed to pollute my parliamentary commentary, I might as well pack it in and leave journalistic oversight to those who write serious stuff.
‘What’s the old boy on about now?’ I hear you asking. I’ll tell you. It appears that my mischievous metaphor of the picador and matador to describe the Scrutiny Management Committee’s taunting and despatch of P&R’s team at January’s public session didn’t go down too well with at least one reader. And my gallows humour about Singapore’s use of the death penalty didn’t go uncriticised, either. While I regret upsetting any reader, I can’t promise that I won’t offend again – and again. Hence this health warning.
And while I’m at it, I ought to explain that I have no influence over the choice of images and cartoons that accompany my scribbling. Ross Le Brun’s brilliant cartoons reflect what he sees in my writing, much as the editorial team acts when it selects any images used.
If there was a case to be made last Wednesday that one vacancy in the Assembly didn’t need to be filled via a by-election, then Deputy Laine made it with elegance but without total persuasiveness. The problem was that his adopted thread of logic seemed to be concealed from him, because it led inexorably to the conclusion that his personal contribution to our government so far has been so inconsequential that nobody would’ve noticed the difference if he’d simply disappeared without trace sometime last summer and not been replaced. By the same token, if he now, for whatever reason, decided he’d had enough and did a runner, the loss of his potential value to our government during the remaining three years or so of this political term would go unnoticed, leaving the smooth tide of government activity and progress undisturbed by even the gentlest of ripples. While I commend Deputy Laine for his modesty – which I happen to think is wholly misplaced in his case – it should be noted that the logic of his argument ought to apply to each of his Assembly colleagues: in other words, if he is himself dispensable, then so too is each member. And let’s extend his logic even further to the future winner of the by-election who, whatever their merits and no matter how hard they intend to work, will take their seat in the knowledge that some members consider them a waste of space, not worth the trouble of an election. ‘Never mind, we have 37 deputies ready and able to work,’ was Deputy Laine’s rallying cry. But isn’t that the problem, dear readers? The evidence so far questions whether all 37 are indeed ready and able.
I’m always cautious in claiming to read Deputy Sloan’s mind, but I don’t think it was wishful thinking on my part to detect in his concluding words what I thought was a clear hint that he agreed with my view of the logic behind Deputy Laine’s case. And those concluding words? ‘If you reduce the value of one of us, you reduce the value of all of us’. Exactly!
The two hours of debate showed the Assembly close to its best and produced infinitely more light than heat. Admittedly, Deputy Helyar did allow something said by Deputy de Sausmarez to get beneath his skin and make him exceedingly cross. As I listened, I tried to keep the word ‘tantrum’ at bay but it wouldn’t go away. Deputy Ozanne also caught my ear with her claim that the law exists to serve politicians. Those of us who think the law is there to serve the people will have found her assertion somewhat scary, doubly so since only one member, Deputy St Pier, could be bothered to challenge it. Among several well-reasoned contributions both for and against holding a by-election, Deputy Camp’s speech in favour of it was by some distance the best, all the better in my view for the rare absence of any reference to her stellar business career.
In the end, the vote to hold the by-election was decisive, despite many members claiming, on wholly uncorroborated anecdotal evidence, that scarcely any of the public wanted one. We will see, won’t we.
When former deputy Lyndon Trott took leave of the States last year, Alderney folk may well have breathed a collective sigh of relief that their principal agent provocateur had retired. Little did they know that a triumvirate of Deputies Vermeulen, McKenna and Inder had undergone a recruit training course to succeed him and had passed out with flying colours. Or, to be more accurate, with non-flying colours. Their novel approach to anyone wanting to fly to Alderney appears to be that it should be done on a wing and a prayer with the added excitement of never knowing if you are going to be able to land at the far end.
Deputies McKenna and Vermeulen mounted the latest of their last-ditch attempts to prevent the introduction of GST. Never in the centuries-long history of Guernsey ditch-digging have so many last ditches been heroically dug to such little effect.
I had better comment from the outset that I retain an open mind on GST. It’s because I’m confused. In the beginning I thought I understood the purpose. The public finances were kaput and GST was the key to mending them: we all needed to tighten our belts; the usual stuff about all of us being in it together; all shoulders to the wheel, those with the broadest shoulders shoving the hardest while shielding the poorest from the worst of it. It was all so straightforward that even I could understand the point of it. But then everything changed. Supporters of GST were so desperate to sell it to the public that they started to present it as a device to actually make two-thirds of us better off. Lo and behold, the magic money tree was back in full leaf. Until GST has made its mind up about what it’s for, I shall remain on the fence.
But neutral as I am, I couldn’t help spotting that maths is not Deputy McKenna’s strong point. What’s more, when it comes to combining maths and his memory of the last general election, the outcome is decidedly dodgy. Let’s face it, if you set out your store as the anti-GST banner carrier, it helps your credibility if you can get your sums right. Try as he might, Deputy McKenna simply can’t do sums. I give two examples. He is one of many of those opposed to GST who have promoted the narrative that the verdict of the last general election was a rejection of GST and that a majority of current Assembly members were elected on the basis of their anti-GST manifesto promises. He is correct that a sense of betrayal is a light sleeper, but his dark warnings of electoral retribution are misplaced. Deputy Burford pointed out that even a cursory look through the manifestos reveals that only eight successful candidates committed to vote against GST. I made it 10, with a further five who used language so evasive that it effectively left the GST door neither closed nor open to them. And the second example? Deputy Mckenna claimed that the 7,040 voters who voted for him and the 6,228 who voted for Deputy Vermeulen amounted to an anti-GST vote of more than 13,000 out of a total of 19,686 voters. I may not be the brightest button in the tin, but even I took no more than five nanoseconds to twig that many of those who voted for the one would have also voted for the other.
Deputy McKenna was though right in one assertion, namely that the rest of the Assembly members weren’t listening to him but were eyes-down in hypnotic communion with their laptops and mobile phones. Like him I deplore what has become the accepted norm but is nothing short of bad manners. Already banned in our schools, so I’m told, these pesky devices would be banned from the Assembly if I had my way. Which of course I never will.
After two hours of debate, the McKenna/Vermeulen trench had filled with uninviting cold water, and only Deputies Curgenven, Kay-Mouat and Van Katwyk were prepared to wade in and join them.
Apart from an unseemly, infantile spat between former Home Affairs colleagues Deputies Leadbeater and McKenna (come on chaps, grow up) the debate had been conducted in mature fashion. Deputy Gollop offered an enigmatic verdict. ‘Deputies McKenna and Vermeulen have done their very best to make an argument.’ Did he mean that the two deputies had made a good argument in vain or that their very best had been pathetic? Best we didn’t know.
Further debate about the wisdom or otherwise of keeping any form of territorial corporation tax on the table ended with a strong vote for it to remain as an option but with an equally strong hint that it is far from a done deal. Along the way we learned that if ever there is need for a heavy dose of doom-spreading, then Deputy Dorrity is our man. He’s a natural.
Friday morning featured the guest appearance of Alice in Wonderland in the form of a bizarre requete. In my long life, I have never met anyone whose appearance was enhanced by having a safety pin shoved through their upper lip. As someone who from time to time has had need of a safety pin but been unable to find one, I can see that on such occasions it would be handy to have one of those things dangling from one’s nose, but apart from that I can’t see the point.
But then, I’m a bit old fashioned when it comes to that sort of thing.
Anyway, it came as a surprise to learn that there are hundreds of 16 and 17-year-olds in Guernsey who apparently are so deeply unhappy with the looks that nature gave them that they live in a constant state of trauma at having to wait until they are 18 before they can legally pin bits of metal to various parts of their face and body. But fear not, relief is now on its way. On Friday morning, after two and a half hours of debate (the time it takes to fly from London to Rome) Deputy St Pier and 28 more deputies convinced themselves that when it comes to assessing the medical risks of face and body piercing, they knew better than Health & Social Care president, Dr Oswald. They chose to ignore the good doctor’s advice and proceeded to lower the legal age to 16 while oozing self-congratulatory satisfaction that at last they were bringing Guernsey kicking and screaming into line with Wales — you know, that place where everyone wears daffodils and wacky hats on their head. So that’s a relief, then. The debate’s outcome soon became a foregone conclusion, the dominant narrative from the start being ‘If that’s what the precious little darlings want, then who are we to tell them they can’t?’ Deputies St Pier, Bury and Curgenven were to the fore among many who took the line that kids being kids there was no alternative but to indulge them, otherwise they’d go ahead and do it anyway, probably by getting some hairy-armed plumber to do it for them in his tool shed, on the quiet in his spare time. An instinctive, laissez-faire urge to indulge children at all costs may be the norm these days, but as a form of reasoning it struck me as clunky, even weird. At a stroke it completely undermined the repeated assurance offered by these deputies that the legislation would insist on the need for the written consent of a parent. Why, I asked myself, would any parent refuse to provide written consent if it’s accepted as inevitable that their child would simply go ahead anyway? What would be the point? Curiously, no mention was made, and no question was asked, of what would happen in a two-parent family if one parent provided written consent against the wishes of the other? Whose view would prevail I wonder, and how would it be decided?
Deputies Camp and Sloan stubbornly, even courageously, spoke against joining the mass ranks of lemmings heading for the cliff edge and rejected the prevailing notion that there was no alternative to tame surrender. Perhaps like me they think parenthood offers a choice between leadership – the hardest path – and followship, the easiest.
Which brings me back to my initial health warning. I’ve probably done the offending bit again. Pass the safety pin please.
