So the GST issue is now settled. Or as settled as States members choose to allow it to remain. It wasn’t plain sailing, of course. It didn’t help that the key debate was preceded by a statement read by treasury lead Deputy Parkinson informing members that Pillar Two tax receipts from the corporate sector had already surpassed assumed estimates and were likely to continue to do so for a couple of years yet. In vain did he explain that this bought the States breathing space and not a structural solution. Too late! No sooner had the words tumbled from his mouth than the anti-GST brigade had heard the cash register zing, banked the money and spent all but £2.50 of it. Who needed GST?!
My views on GST should be of no interest to any sensible person, but whatever they may be, they will not affect one jot anything I write in my parliamentary sketches. The issue has polluted, if not quite poisoned, the lifeblood of this political term’s first year, and our hope should be that its resolution – if that is indeed what we witnessed last week – will have a cleansing effect on Guernsey’s body politic. To pursue the medical metaphor, raw wounds should be allowed to heal themselves and there should be no place for bad blood to contaminate our future government. To that end, I will play my insignificant part by keeping the nature of my leg-pulling of our elected politicians to nothing worse than an irritating itch to any but the very thinnest of skins.
One benefit of the tensions which have characterised the long-running GST debate is that the process has been immensely revealing about the members of a government which is now well into its second of four years of office. What is more, the revelations are on balance not bad.
There may well be the occasional cry of the worst States ever, but they don’t come from my lips. For what it’s worth – and I hear some of you crying ‘That’s not much’ – here’s my analysis of what the first year of our new government tells us about it.
Among the new members, a solid core of seven – Deputies Montague, Oswald, Laine (not new but returning), Rochester, Williams, Strachan and Niles – are talented assets to our government and may well include a P&R president of the future. Significantly, they are clear improvements on those who failed to be re-elected from the previous term and, with the exception of Peter Ferbrache, got the elbow they probably deserved, if only for their part in bequeathing the ruinous secondary/post-16 education system that we are now stuck with. Regrettably, some survivors from the previous term and a handful of newcomers have already qualified as out-and-out plonkers (in the interests of harmony and goodwill I refrain from naming them) but I would place only eight in this category, compared with 14 in the previous Assembly and seven in the 2016-20 Assembly of which I was an undistinguished member. I predict that some of these eight will continue to struggle to resemble normal human beings.
That gives us a score so far of rising stars – seven; wacky, populist kranks – eight. So what of the remaining 25? In my view they’re a reassuring – sort of – assortment comprising sufficient experienced hands, some of whom have matured through previous service and aren’t likely to try anything too daft; a workable number of conscientious but not especially gifted or inspirational toilers of the committee scene, a couple of whom appear to have sworn an oath of Trappist or Zen Buddhist silence; a mercifully small woke contingent; a couple of time-servers addicted to process over action whose potential damage is limited to an unwelcome vote or waste of debating time; a manageable number of whopping great egos that are yet to be pricked by colleagues or to implode from an excess of self-nourishment; oh, and Deputy Gollop.
I find one legacy of the debate especially intriguing. Of the 17 members who voted against GST in any form, two are presidents of States principal committees, Deputies Bury and Leadbeater at Employment & Social Security and Home Affairs respectively. Come future budget debates, will they be extending their committee hands for a level of funding which will only be affordable via a taxation source that they have voted as unacceptable to them? And if they do, will Deputy Bury’s vice-president at ESS, Deputy Ozanne, and Deputy Leadbeater’s fellow Home Affairs members Deputies Vermeulen and Alderney Representative Snowdon join them? And will the following also extend the begging bowl despite voting against GST: Deputy Collins at Housing; Deputy Matthews, vice-president at Health & Social Care and member of Education Sport & Culture; Deputy Cameron at ESC and Environment & Infrastructure; Deputy Kay-Mouat at E&I and States Trading Supervisory Board; Deputy van Katwyk at Economic Development; and Deputy Curgenven at ESC?
If they do, next month’s meeting on the 2027 budget may begin to show whether or not we would be justified in thinking of a word that begins with ‘h’.
Directing the conduct of members of the Assembly will be our new Bailiff.
If there is a downside to having a female presiding officer in the States of Deliberation it is solely that it invites each member to decide how to acknowledge her when addressing the Assembly through her, as is required – but not always observed. Male holders of the office are routinely acknowledged by a ‘Sir’ or from time to time by either ‘Mr Bailiff’ or ‘Mr Deputy Bailiff’. Not exactly a challenging decision to make. But a female deputy bailiff, and now bailiff, poses a choice, and the outcome is not always pleasant to my ears. I have no problem with ‘Madam Bailiff’ or a simple ‘Madam’. They are the direct equivalent of the male titles. ‘Mam’ to rhyme with ‘jam’ is acceptable but unnecessarily grand. The late queen encouraged it, if only to discourage ‘Marm’ to rhyme with ‘smarm’ which she once told me she disliked intensely (how’s that for a name-drop!). ‘Marm’ just sounds so unctuously, fawningly Uriah-Heepish (Dickens variety, not rock band). Deputy Curgenven is but one of several ‘marmers’ in the Assembly, but you get more ‘marms’ per sentence from him and they somehow sound just that bit more creepy coming from him. I sensed that the Bailiff winced on receiving them, but if she didn’t, I found myself wincing for her. Can we have more plain ‘madams’ please members?
I am warming towards Deputy Inder. This news will of course alarm him, but there it is. I’ve written previously that we elect our deputies to govern on our behalf and not for their entertainment value or talent with words, but even so it’s worth a comment when they do occasionally come up with a turn of phrase that compensates for the banality of standard parliamentary discourse and resonates on a personal level. For example, I loved Deputy Inder’s rallying cry to his Assembly colleagues: ‘Members of the States, we stand on the shoulders of giants.’
It may not be original, but it seemed to be a spontaneous and spot-on reaction to the unremitting negativity with which too many members had been marinating the chamber for two days. Mind you, as he said it, it occurred to me that those shoulders needed to be strong and well-padded to bear the weight of some members.
I was also taken by Deputy Inder’s catchy ‘AI slop’ by which he characterised the contributions to debate offered by Deputies Sloan and Camp, respectively president and member of the not-very-neutral Scrutiny Management Committee. For a time, I was worried that the involuntary retirement of former Deputy Carl Meerveld would deprive Deputy Inder of the sort of antagonist on which he depends to get fired up. I am relieved to acknowledge that he appears to have found potential successors, although it is yet too early to judge whether they have the complete Meerveld touch.
And then, as if to guarantee my new affection, I heard that Deputy Inder has been criticised, and may even be complained against, for offering an indelicate gesture to some of Guernsey’s least endearing citizens who had greeted him less than politely outside the Royal Court entrance. Good on him, I say. And so much better and more honest than those cringing apologies whimpered by some deputies who felt it necessary to say sorry for voting as they did. In my view, if the throwers of abuse want to dish such stuff out, they need to learn to take it when it’s returned. If it had been me, my response would have featured two fingers and not Deputy Inder’s alleged one, and I can picture my late chum Deputy Dave Jones nodding his approval.
Not for the first time, Deputy Goy wished members, and of course his adoring public, to know that his work on behalf of the decent, ordinary people of Guernsey – namely preparing seemingly interminable amendments – had adversely impacted his family life. As he did so, my thoughts turned to the long-suffering States Greffier who, at Deputy Goy’s stubborn and self-indulgent insistence, was obliged to read out every agonising word of the 55 pages of amendments (the longest was 13 pages). He probably wished Deputy Goy hadn’t bothered. Having to recite so many bucket loads of turgidity can’t have done his family life much good, either. And just think of those members who’d had to listen to it – they can’t have been the best of family company when they got home.
As but one member of the tax-paying public who together pays Deputy Goy a salary of around £50,000, I wonder if it isn’t by now time for him to return our generosity by applying his undoubted talents to doing something useful, such as serving in one of the States committees where actual stuff is done rather than just talked about.
In a frankly embarrassing episode, one of those when you want to hide behind the sofa, Deputy Van Katwyk paid sycophantic tribute to the same Deputy Sloan who had got Deputy Inder’s goat. It just goes to show that one man’s AI slop is another man’s treasure. The gist of Deputy Van Katwyk’s almost hysterical plea to his fellow deputies was that since Deputy Sloan was none other than Dr Sloan, whose doctorate is in economics, members should follow his infallible advice and vote against GST. Simple as that. This novel approach to discharging one’s responsibilities as an elected representative may have appealed to some but, call me old-fashioned, I’m more impressed by deputies who have a mind of their own and are prepared to use it. To be fair, Deputy Van Katwyk’s advice to members to outsource their thinking process was easily explained – apparently, they should have been too busy turning stones on our beaches to be thinking for themselves. Resorting to the tried-and-tested ormer hunting metaphor, he urged colleagues to focus exclusively on turning over all stones in their search for an alternative to GST. No matter how many hours spent and how many stones turned, there was always another stone waiting to be turned. I heard a warning cry of ‘But time and tide wait for no man.’ Deputy Le Brun – for it was he – is not the Assembly’s star cartoonist for nothing: he had already pictured a hapless, half-submerged Deputy Van Katwyk frantically looking for yet another stone under three feet of water.
For any parliamentary sketch writer constantly thirsting for material, the amiable Deputy Vermeulen is the deep well that never dries. He rarely disappoints. His unscripted, conversational style of speechifying is commendable, but the risk of gaffes, bumbles and Freudian slips is high. Last week he offered three typically varied gems. Unhappy with proposals to limit the length of speeches to five minutes, he revealed that he viewed the Assembly principally as a place to gather and have a leisurely chat about things rather than bother too much about actually deciding to do anything. Perhaps unintentionally, this revelation offered an interesting insight into his past contributions in the Assembly.
Never one to lack self-confidence, he later responded to the Bailiff’s ruling on a procedural matter by asking her if she was sure she knew what she was doing. Her response to him was infinitely more charitable than it might have been.
While I share Deputy Vermeulen’s justified concerns about the failure of the Revenue Services to keep pace with dealing with our tax returns, it is not an obsession of mine to the extent it is to him. For the umpteenth time he spluttered his outrage that the relevant backlog remained around a thousand. It left me wondering how outraged he must be by a backlog four times bigger but which, curiously, he never mentions, this one being the 4,000 applications still unresolved by the Population Management Office. This serious impediment to the further development of the economy is a crisis that has arisen on his six-year watch as vice-president and now a member of the guilty committee, Home Affairs.
Mention of Deputy Vermeulen’s less-than-gracious challenge to the Bailiff reminds me that the equally self-confident Deputy Sloan had a tricky moment with her when he found himself talking over her just a tad longer and louder than parliamentary good manners called for. I think a gentle elbow nudge to him is in order; something along the lines that he may have 6,081 votes behind him, but she has the big one that counts – it’s the one signed ‘Charles Rex III’.
Deputy Helyar had us all giggling when he alerted members to the predictable reluctance of the wealthy to choose to come to Guernsey and spend big on excessively-taxed luxury items. He likened their reluctance to that of cows invited to turn up at the abattoir to be milked. He could have added – but didn’t – that any cows turning up at the abattoir only to find themselves being milked were likely to be happily relieved cows. It left me thinking that cows would be even less enthusiastic about turning up at the milk shed to be milked if it became known that they were instead likely to be terminally zapped there.
You would have thought that there’s enough really big stuff going on in Guernsey and the rest of the world to discourage deputies from introducing into an already overcrowded, running-late agenda any items that are relatively trivial and more about appearances than effects. Not a bit of it. Deputies St Pier and Bury were determined to remove our Lt-Governor’s exemption from paying income tax here. No matter the lack of evidence that Guernsey folk knew of the historical exemption or cared two monkeys about it.
Here was attention-seeking, self-indulgent politics at its most obvious at the very moment that the Assembly was breaking its communal back trying to resolve the essential issues within the fast-vanishing time left to them. It had an ending that some of us found delicious. A tied 17-17 vote meant the amended final proposition failed, whereupon Deputy St Pier unsportingly demanded and was granted a second vote. In a salute not dissimilar to that offered by Deputy Inder to his abusers, the same 17 members who had voted contre and the same six members who had abstained, defiantly stuck to their guns and thereby delivered a ‘get lost’ message to those who had showed themselves to be bad losers.
I end this sketch on a sentimental note. Last week’s meeting had begun with deserved tributes to two island stalwarts, former Deputy Martin Ozanne and former douzaine representative Brian Sheriff. I would add only one remark to the tributes paid by the Bailiff and that is to comment on Brian Sheriff’s distinctive voice. Whether speaking on the radio, in the parliamentary Assembly or simply face-to-face, his was a voice that I can still hear as clearly as I can recall his appearance. He had only to speak to be recognised. It was a voice that spoke of the man himself. It was warm and rich; baritone-deep, silky, rhythmic and perfectly made for the broadcast media. It soothed and it assured.
There isn’t a voice in our contemporary local broadcast media or in the States of Deliberation that comes even close. Rest in peace you old smoothie.
