Routine update statements from committee presidents have become ingrained as warm-up acts at the start of States meetings. To be frank, members learn little from them that they didn’t already know – or if by chance they didn’t already know, then they haven’t been paying attention. That said, these statements are worth their place in the meeting for the question-and-answer sequence which follows each of them. These are invariably informative and entertaining.
So they were as last week’s meeting got under way.
First up was Deputy Gabriel as president of Environment & Infrastructure. If he was aware that some members openly resent his committee’s very existence, it didn’t show.
To be honest, I can’t remember anything at all about his statement, but two things caught my attention during questions to him from the floor of the Assembly. The first was his response to Deputy Vermeulen’s concern about coastal erosion beyond Portelet Harbour. ‘I’m not King Canute’, he explained. Oh dear! Smart alecs like me know that if he wanted to make the point that he couldn’t control the tides, what he should’ve said was ‘I am King Canute’. Deputy Gabriel is not, of course, alone in misunderstanding the whole point of the probably apocryphal act of England’s medieval Danish king. I fondly remember standing at the spot in Bosham, West Sussex, where he is said to have demonstrated to his loyal people that as their king, he had only temporal powers that didn’t include command of the sea and tide, which only God possessed.
I was also struck, rather painfully, by Deputy Gabriel’s constant reference to the presiding Deputy Bailiff as ‘Marm’, to rhyme — coincidentally but appropriately — with ‘smarm’. It’s what a grovelling Uriah Heep would have used. The late Queen Elizabeth disliked the pronunciation. She once told me so in a whisper after being addressed as such by another. (How’s that for name-dropping!). She much preferred ‘Mam’ to rhyme with ‘jam’. I suspect that the Deputy Bailiff isn’t too fussed. Or if she is, that she has become somewhat stoical about the variety of references to her. Alderney Representative Hill promoted her to Bailiff. She seemed to quite like that. Being occasionally addressed as ‘Sir’ is met with a smile and a shrug and only the mildest of corrections. I quite like Deputy Kazantseva-Miller’s simple ‘Madam’ or Deputy Malik’s less formal ‘Mam’. After all, if the latter is good enough for the late Queen...
Next up was Deputy Helyar as president of the States Trading Supervisory Board. He revealed, inter alia, that Aurigny was heading for an annual loss in the region of £5m., an unknown portion of which would be due to our States-owned airline’s loss of passengers to British Airways’ new service from Heathrow. That’s the service subsidised by you and me as taxpayers. This revelation brought me close to a state of euphoria. My spirits were already high in the knowledge that as a taxpayer I will henceforth be subsidising those well-to-do Guernsey travellers heading for their holidays in the Caribbean, Florida, the Middle East and Far East by saving them the cost and inconvenience of a bus or train journey between Gatwick and Heathrow. I do hope that as they lounge of a balmy evening on a veranda sipping their cocktails they will pause just for a moment to silently thank those of us who are subsiding them. After all, it’s the sort of thing that the concept of taxing old-aged pensioners was designed for, n’est ce pas? I’m even more enthused by the suggestion that, thanks to my contributions as a taxpayer, travellers arriving at Heathrow from distant parts of the world who previously were put off from holidaying or doing business in Guernsey by the need to transfer to Gatwick, will now look up at the Heathrow departure board, spot our name on it and hop on the next taxpayer-subsidised flight here. Nor does the source of my happiness end there. Joy of joys, the cost to me and other Guernsey taxpayers of our personal subsidy of British Airways and its travellers will remain unknown on two counts. The Committee for Economic Development, to whom this wizzo-prang scheme owes its birth, won’t tell us how much we taxpayers are paying for the supreme pleasure of subsidising a foreign company and its customers. Nor will we ever be sure how much we will be paying as taxpayers to make up for Aurigny’s losses caused by the new link. Amongst my boundless enthusiasm for ED’s initiative, I have just two mildly negative thoughts. I wonder how many other foreign companies only agree to compete with Guernsey companies if they are subsidised by the taxpayer for doing so while further insisting that Guernsey taxpayers are not allowed to know how much it is costing them. Finally, despite my infinite happiness, I won’t be using the new link. The last time I suffered the BA Heathrow experience, the place provided a convincing depiction of hell on earth, and the airline lost my luggage.
The third and final routine update came from the States of Alderney in the person of Alderney Representative Hill. At its heart, the political relationship between Guernsey and Alderney combines tension with affection, the balance between the two elements constantly changing with events. Mr Hill’s statement and the questions it inspired at last week’s meeting illustrated this characteristic well. Former Deputy Trott used to do more than his bit in contributing to the element of tension. His retirement left the Assembly with a vacancy which Deputy Inder seems willing to fill. He is not yet the complete Trott package as far as Alderney is concerned, but he’s working on it.
There followed a special additional statement delivered by Deputy St Pier, with the permission of the presiding officer, to allow early consideration of the chief executive’s recently published report on the future digital services cock-up. Since the report had not named names, members’ knives had been sharpened and were looking for targets. Retribution and blame had now become not just the elephant in the room but a whole herd of the huge beasts was stomping around the Assembly, some of them in the mean mood to rip a few acres of bamboo out of their roots. There were two basic questions to be addressed. Was the then-Assembly’s decision in July 2019 to proceed with the Agilisys contract to blame, or was it the failure of the successor States to adequately scrutinise it during the 2020-25 political term? Or, as a third question, was it both?
The still-serving survivors from the Assembly that gave the go ahead in 2019 are only seven in number: Deputy St Pier who was P&R president at the time, and deputies Gollop, Parkinson, Leadbeater, Hansmann-Rouxel, Inder and de Sausmarez. None of them voted against the contract, although Deputy Inder almost certainly would have if he had attended the relevant meeting, which he didn’t. Only three members voted not to proceed in 2019, so the case for the contract must have looked convincing. Of those members of P&R and the Scrutiny Management Committee who served during the years when everything went pear-shaped, only deputies Helyar and Gollop (P&R) and Burford (SMC) remain as Assembly members. The result, perhaps inevitably, was that last week’s discussion of the fiasco by current members was never a case of mea culpa. Instead it was eorum culpa. In other words, it was up to others to apologise. There was a weird pervading sense that somehow the entire tragedy was something that had been inflicted on us by aliens over whom we had had no control. In an uncomfortable parallel with the farce unravelling in London over the appointment of a close chum of a convicted paedophile and sex trafficker as the UK’s ambassador to the court of King Donald, a Starmeresque question was being asked in Guernsey’s parliament: why didn’t anyone tell me it was all going wrong? To which the answer from some Assembly members was in the form of a further question that is by now familiar in London: why didn’t you bloney-well ask?
This was episode one of a series that will run and run.
Readers who think Donald Trump is the arch conspiracy theorist should’ve been in the Assembly to witness Deputy Camp’s demonstration that the Donald is a mere novice in the role. In an incessantly aggressive and accusatory monotone, and with a total lack of eye contact with her audience, she read mechanically from her laptop a frankly dreary narrative that depicted the entire P&R membership as a Machiavellian bunch of malign conspirators obsessed with agenda control and set on establishing cabinet government and emasculating the Assembly by stealth. It was the sort of populist stuff with which Guernsey’s Mr and Mrs Angry bitterly exorcise their sad lives on some social media platforms.
Deputy Helyar was having none of this stuff but was more compassionate and restrained than he might have been in dealing with it. As he rose to speak, I half expected the hard-hitting politician in him to ruthlessly expose the breathtaking vacuity and intellectual deficit in what he had heard. Instead, members listened to a schoolmaster patiently taking a struggling pupil through a shoddy piece of homework, as he explained to Deputy Camp what to most of us was the bleedin’ obvious, namely that P&R’s proposed policy for dealing with major projects, far from undermining the role of the Assembly as she claimed, would do the exact opposite. What was more, in my words not his, he exposed to clear light the fact that Deputy Camp’s concept for establishing priorities was the equivalent of inviting all 39 Assembly members to constantly debate whether the chicken or the egg should come first. A more certain guarantee of sclerotic governmental constipation was hard to imagine. His message was delivered all the more effectively by speaking without notes and looking his audience in the eye, thereby providing a brutal contrast with what members had just been subjected to. If by chance my view of Deputy Camp’s speech and her approach to prioritising major projects is considered harshly one-sided, I would mention in passing that only one member joined her in voting against P&R’s proposed policy.
Life benefits from contrasts and if the Assembly needed yet another one, up stepped Deputy Goy keen to do his bit. Members usually get the complete works from him. He didn’t disappoint. Talk about eye contact! Any deputy’s eye caught by his was in acute danger of being dislocated by one of his flailing hands. He hovered menacingly over his microphone like a hungry bird of prey that has just spotted promising movement in the grass. If ever a microphone could be described as cowering, it was his. Deputy Goy was on his favourite mission, that of trying to persuade members to buy some stuff called KPI. Whatever it is, Deputy Goy seems addicted to it. Judging from his all-action contributions in the Assembly, it’s very effective as an upper but my personal view is that he would benefit from taking an occasional downer.
He gave an interesting speech constructed on his novel personal interpretation of Lord Tennyson’s epic poem, The Charge Of The Light Brigade. There were ‘cannon to right of him, cannon to left of him, cannon in front of him...’ but he wasn’t worried because the cannons were useless and kept blowing apart whenever they fired their potentially lethal balls. Like many in the Assembly, I couldn’t quite work out what this had to do with the subject of the debate but I have to admit that it did leave me with one of those intriguing ‘what if’ questions that arise when looking back on historical events: what if the Russian cannon had been as flawed as P&R’s were alleged to be by Deputy Goy?
I end on a positive note. Nine months into the current political term, Deputy Malik made her maiden speech. It is a pleasant parliamentary convention that maiden speeches are applauded. What is more, the applause usually verges on the rapturous whether the quality of the speech be up there with Winston Churchill’s in his prime or down there with some of the worst ever made. As for the latter, I’ve had to sit through a few, from speakers whose names not even the gift of Bollinger’s best would drag from me.
