Oh dear! I have upset fellow columnist Horace Camp. His letter, (Guernsey Press, 12 August) makes a serious charge against me – namely that in my most recent parliamentary sketch I allowed my political views to get in the way of fairly selecting which deputies deserved to have their legs pulled. Specifically, Horace was disappointed that my alleged views on GST led me to give GST opponents a hard time while letting advocates of the tax have an easy ride. Getting on the wrong side of a national treasure is to enter dangerous territory, so here’s my exit plan.
My first thought was that Horace had simply missed the point of my sketch, but I quickly dismissed it when reminding myself that, as a satirical sketch writer, the onus is rightfully on me to make my point so clearly that it couldn’t be missed by any reader. I regard it as a privilege to have a monthly slot in the Guernsey Press and any privilege comes with a responsibility to live up to it.
Horace is correct in asserting that my credibility as a parliamentary commentator depends on each member of the States Assembly ‘wondering whether they will be next’ for a tease, irrespective of their views on any particular issue, so I’m grateful for the warning that on this occasion I put that credibility at risk. My sketches try to capture the Assembly as the stage of a theatre. As the theatregoer, I simply react without fear or favour to what I hear and see the actors say and do on – and occasionally off – that stage, rather than to their views. It’s true that some, willingly or not, are more prolific and generous than others in offering gifts to someone who, like me, has a sense of the ridiculous and a tendency towards irreverence, but I suppose that’s life.
I offer two defences.
The first is to invite Horace and readers to accept that it’s just possible – however remotely and however statistically unlikely – that opponents of GST happen to be more prone to self-parody than others, and hence a richer source of material for leg-pulling sketches such as mine. I put it as charitably as I can that supporters of GST are, with a few exemptions, a boringly normal bunch who rarely say anything giggle-worthy. And why should they? The electorate voted them in to govern us competently and not to provide us with laughs. By way of contrast, many opponents of the controversial tax have found it difficult to contribute to debate without having an unfortunate oratorical accident along the way. It’s as if the electors chose them specifically to feed me material. And if you think that is far-fetched, can you think of a more convincing explanation for how some members managed to get elected?
My second defence is to point out that the sketch that has made Horace cross included the clear assertion that ‘I’m a GST sceptic’, my intended point being that, as such, I was all the more frustrated that those opposed to the introduction of GST were making such a woefully comic job of opposing it. A harsh judgement? No, and here’s why.
They do no more than cite a mantra that comprises four blinding glimpses of the obvious – that GST is inherently regressive; that it’s too easy to raise its rate from time to time; that there are alternative solutions to GST; and that several deputies who previously opposed it are now its leading advocates. So far so obvious. And just to rub it in and add to my frustration, the Assembly’s GST opponents collectively offer this parrot-like recital of their mantra as if they are sharing with us the product of a rare genius. Of course GST is regressive; we all know it; most taxes are. Of course the rate of GST is too easily raised when it suits, just like income tax rates and any tax rate you care to think of. Of course there are alternative solutions to any problem, albeit some less practical or tasty than others. And of course politicians can change their mind; do we really want to be governed by pre-programmed robots?
So, isn’t it about time that the anti-GST clan came up with some hard-hitting facts rather than vacuous slogans? Even the newest members have been in office for a year, others for close on a decade, and yet they offer not a shred of hard evidence that GST need not and should not be part of the solution to our government’s central problem; namely, how to avoid getting into debt or dipping into precious reserves whilst keeping the island going and maintaining – or where necessary renewing – key elements of our critical infrastructure. It’s true that anti-GST members make regular and vague claims of waste to be eliminated, savings to be made and civil servants to be sacked, but they never come close to identifying which and how much waste, which services can be cut and which civil servants in which committees are due for the chop. Their obsession with who wrote and said what to get elected last year is not only irrelevant to the merits and demerits of GST but is also by now verging on the weird by leading some of them into imagining stuff that was never written in election manifestos. Ironically, the fanciful imagination of one of the most obsessed of the obsessed, Deputy Curgenven, was on display in the same edition of the Guernsey Press as Horace’s reprimand of me. Deputy Curgenven claims that around a dozen serving deputies ‘rode into office on explicit anti-GST tickets’ and leaves us to infer that the same members have since reneged on their word. The word ‘explicit’ is purposely precise in its meaning, namely that something expressed explicitly is clear and direct in its intended understanding, and leaves no room for ambiguity, confusion, doubt or hidden meaning. In the context of last year’s election, an explicit anti-GST ticket would require an unambiguous commitment such as ‘If elected, I will vote against GST’. With that in mind, and being the senile political anorak that I am these days, I examined election manifestos of successful candidates. Here’s what I found.
A total of seven successful candidates stood on an explicit anti-GST ticket: Deputies Collins, Curgenven, McKenna, Parkinson, Van Katwyk, Vermeulen and Williams. Of those, only one, Deputy Parkinson, now calls for GST to be introduced, while a second, Deputy Williams, voted against the amendment (Amendment 2) that would have stopped GST in its tracks.
A further nine successful candidates hedged their bets with varying degrees of manifesto ambiguity and verbal gymnastics over GST (Blin – reform first; Bury – only after corporate tax reform and closure of tax loopholes; Cameron – set up a commission to find alternatives to GST; Gabriel – I generally oppose GST on its own; Goy – don’t even consider GST until the wealthiest pay their fair share; Laine – avoid GST by boosting the economy; Leadbeater – only as a last resort, not first; Matthews – will vote for viable alternatives; and Rylatt – only after business and wealthy pay their fair share.) Of these nine, six (Bury, Cameron, Gabriel, Laine, Leadbeater and Rylatt) voted against rejecting GST outright via Amendment 2, while a seventh, Deputy Matthews, abstained.
Six successful candidates (Deputies Gollop, Dorrity, Helyar, Malik, Montague and Oswald) indicated either support for or acceptance of GST, albeit with different levels of enthusiasm. As many as 14 eventual winners – yes, 14! – (Camp, Burford, de Sausmarez, Hansmann Rouxel, Humphries, Inder, Kay-Mouat, Kazantseva-Miller, Niles, Ozanne, Rochester, Sloan, St Pier and Strachan) managed to avoid any mention of GST in their manifestos. Deputy Falla belongs in a distinguished category of his own: he mentioned GST, but only to reveal that he’d never voted for it in the past and then, intriguingly, omitted to indicate if he would continue to oppose it in the future. Now, as a member of P&R, he supports its introduction.
I’m not sure that many deductions can be made from this analysis with much confidence. I must be typical of many voters in that I didn’t vote either for or against candidates simply on the basis of their views on GST, whether explicitly or implicitly expressed in their manifestos. But one conclusion is clear – Deputy Curgenven’s implied accusation that around a dozen deputies broke explicit electoral commitments is exposed as faulty. I don’t believe for one minute that any deputy would stoop so low as to deliberately set out to deploy their own delusional version of facts in order to create the myth of an electorate betrayed, so I suspect that this is a simple case of Deputy Curgenven finding sums and semantics a bit of a struggle. In which case, perhaps Deputy Montague, as ESC president, could arrange for his ESC colleague to have extra tuition, followed by a belated resit of his maths and English language GCSEs.
Mind you, Deputy Curgenven’s missive is not without some justification. Deputies de Sausmarez, Burford and others who in years past have spoken against GST and are now leading advocates of it, deserve to be confronted with their former stances and owe it to us all to explain their apparent Damascene conversions. Also with some explaining to do are the 14 members who failed to even mention GST in their manifestos. It’s true that the election was not conducted on a single issue, but the unsubtle ploy of avoiding mention of this controversial tax in manifestos was surely too transparently disingenuous to have escaped the notice of even the dimmest of us voters.
For the record, on current evidence I oppose the introduction of GST. My scepticism goes back to the previous political term. GST’s original proposers argued that the aim behind its proposed introduction was to help dig us out of some deep financial poo. We were all to be in the shovelling together, such was the direness of our imminent fiscal position. So far so credible. But it wasn’t long before anticipation of the bad smell threatened a widescale downing of shovels.
In response, our then leaders reached for the air freshener and sprayed the intended purpose of the tax with a new, more palatable fragrance, namely that the new tax would make most of us better off. I remember thinking at the time: ‘Hello, hello. Something’s not quite right here.’ Call me old-fashioned, but I found the concept of taxing everybody more while simultaneously making most of them better off was a bit too novel for me.
Since then my suspicions have hardened, and here’s why. GST or VAT – call it what you will – simply doesn’t work. Forget all the tosh on which the Assembly’s anti-GST blob has so far built its case and instead just look at the evidence worldwide which demonstrates that resorting to comprehensive consumption taxes almost inevitably plunges countries deeper and deeper into debt. Of all the countries that have introduced a GST-style tax, only Liechtenstein has matched its government spending to its income without borrowing.
The message is clear – VAT and its cousins encourage governments to spend more and more, and they do it by borrowing more and more. What’s more, the cost of national debt is ruinous. The UK is a prime but typical example amongst the many. The UK government introduced VAT at 10% in 1973 when government spending and national debt were respectively at 39% and 59% of gross domestic product (GDP). Over the decades, the rate of UK VAT has changed, briefly down to 8%, then up through 15% to 17.5% to its current 20%. The result is that although the spend/GDP ratio has remained relatively steady (last year it was at 44%) the national debt/GDP ratio had rocketed to a calamitous 95% in 2025. For every pound the UK government spends on defence, it spends two in repaying merely the interest on its debt. Last year, the £130bn paid in interest matched the UK’s entire annual expenditure on education. And the debt just keeps on growing. Last year, the UK government borrowed a further £130bn. Babies yet to be born in the UK to parents who haven’t yet even met will take their first breaths already up to their necks in a debt waiting for them to pay when they become taxpayers.
As a national strategy, it’s bonkers, and yet the UK is far from the most egregious example of the world’s innumerable economic basket cases which sought fiscal salvation through consumption taxes. I can’t of course prove cause and effect, but universally the outcome of reliance on consumption taxes to balance the books is invariably nothing short of reckless fiscal promiscuity. And as I see it, the challenge facing P&R and its supporters is to explain why the outcome in Guernsey would be any different to everywhere else.
And my challenge to members of the blob is to supplement their exclusively negative campaign with some positive alternatives which – I would remind Deputy Curgenven – need to be EXPLICIT. Meanwhile, GST-free Guernsey, for all its imperfections, has a spend/GDP ratio of 23% and a debt/GDP ratio of around 12%. Food for thought, eh?
If savings offer an alternative to GST, never let it be said that I have no constructive suggestions for where they can be made. Unlike the Assembly’s anti-GST blob, who between them have so far not managed to put a single specific example of where it might be possible to save even 50p in States expenditure, I have several proposals up my sleeve. Here’s just one example to give you a flavour. During my one inglorious term as a States deputy, I served as vice-president of two principal committees, Home Affairs and Education, Sport & Culture. I know; it’s a scary thought, but they were desperate times. Serving at Home Affairs opened my eyes to achievable cost savings. Take the prison for example. As I told my Home Affairs colleagues at the time, I could never understand how it had come about that the inmates were no longer treated as convicts. Regard them as convicts, I urged, and from that first step it would get easy. We wouldn’t need to employ chefs in an expensive kitchen to cook bacon and egg breakfasts for our convicts. If good old-fashioned gruel was good enough for Oliver Twist, it should be good enough for convicts. And not just for breakfast, but for all meals. They could cook it for themselves. A few dandelions could be tossed into the pot to provide a balanced diet, but that’s as far as refinement should go. And as part of this new, progressive and cost-saving approach to our convicts, I suggested re-introducing chain gangs to take on some of the more unpleasant tasks faced by States Works. Sadly, Home Affairs had a rather woke political membership, so my advice fell on deaf ears, but it’s never too late, is it?
I have equally enlightened proposals resulting from my time at ESC, but conscious that some readers may be of a delicate disposition, I will keep them to myself.
I don’t know whether all this will have convinced Horace Camp that target selection for my teasing of certain deputies in my July sketch owed little or nothing to political motives. It really was a simple case of the blobbish campaign mounted so far by the Assembly’s anti-GST members having proved to be especially fertile ground for me now that my role is to try to sprinkle our politics with a smile or two. And in that role, as far as I’m concerned each and every member remains fair game.
I end this sketch with something to give any especially sensitive readers peace of mind – when suggesting savings at the prison, I was only joking. I think.
‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.’
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Polonius offers advice to his departing son Laertes.
