I wish I was so bad at my job they paid me that much not to come again!

Just when it seemed that the States of Jersey were exhausting their power to shock the island's citizenry, along comes a new and bigger scandal.

Nobody could take issue with two senior civil servants, who had failed to manage their responsibilities successfully, choosing to resign before they incurred formal dismissal. In fact, it is a shame that they did not depart even sooner. And I suppose that it is a kind of constructive dismissal to warn them that a disciplinary dismissal would be the outcome of any ill-judged attempt to cling to office, so inviting their resignations..

On the other hand, it is hard to see how anybody could not take issue with paying enough to have funded some well-appreciated service such as school milk for a couple of years as an inducement to resign. At that level of management, remuneration already reflects the risk that the boss will be expected to take the responsibility for failure by moving aside. Ogley and Pollard both failed to run their areas of responsibility to the standard the public expected from them for their money, and both should have simply gone. To offer them hundreds of thousands of pounds not to come into work anymore, just to save the bother of firing them is an utter absurdity and obscenity.

It is not hard to think of reasons why they should have left under clouds. Whatever one thinks of Stuart Syvret, in days of better mental health he exposed totally unacceptable management failings at the Health Department, that Pollard must be held responsible for continuing, even if they pre-date his watch originally. Ogley is up to his neck in malfeasances involving Syvret and Graham Power, and has been at the heart of every unsatisfactory piece of government policy of the last few years. I seem to remember that his reference was leading the implementation of hardline Tory cuts in Hertfordshire. Through the worst years of of Thatcher and Major, Jersey used to take pride in its wealth enabling it to do things that little bit better on the whole, but now our leaders want to catch up in their race to the bottom, and Ogley was seen as the man to do it.

Although it is rumoured that Jersey appears as a major producer in the accounts of a famous banana trading firm, it is not really a banana republic. Some would have it that The Jersey Way is just like one, but, in fact, very British attitudes predominate. Messrs Pollard and Ogley were sadly misled, if they were given the expectation that they were going to enjoy the levels of licence and impunity needed to get away with their style of doing things. And who so misled them?

Even if they had been induced to take up their posts by false pretences, the compensation given for their departure seems altogether disproportionate. And who saw fit to be so generous with our money, and, moreover, why?

The answers are of course that The Council of Ministers, and maybe a few close advisers, were who, and to induce them to take the rap for those behind them was why. However much initiative these men were supposed to exercise in carrying out their orders, and however much advice they gave as to what those orders should be, there can be no doubt which way the chain of command actually runs.

The whole sorry scandal is a sign that we have elected some unworthy leaders to the highest offices, if they will hire help to do such things, and need to buy their silence so expensively, when they fail to get away with them. We must choose more carefully next time: Although so much damage has already been done now, that nobody could fix it all in a term or two, we must stop adding to it.

I wish I was so bad at my job they paid me that much not to come again!

Just when it seemed that the States of Jersey were exhausting their power to shock the island's citizenry, along comes a new and bigger scandal.

Nobody could take issue with two senior civil servants, who had failed to manage their responsibilities successfully, choosing to resign before they incurred formal dismissal. In fact, it is a shame that they did not depart even sooner. And I suppose that it is a kind of constructive dismissal to warn them that a disciplinary dismissal would be the outcome of any ill-judged attempt to cling to office, so inviting their resignations..

On the other hand, it is hard to see how anybody could not take issue with paying enough to have funded some well-appreciated service such as school milk for a couple of years as an inducement to resign. At that level of management, remuneration already reflects the risk that the boss will be expected to take the responsibility for failure by moving aside. Ogley and Pollard both failed to run their areas of responsibility to the standard the public expected from them for their money, and both should have simply gone. To offer them hundreds of thousands of pounds not to come into work anymore, just to save the bother of firing them is an utter absurdity and obscenity.

It is not hard to think of reasons why they should have left under clouds. Whatever one thinks of Stuart Syvret, in days of better mental health he exposed totally unacceptable management failings at the Health Department, that Pollard must be held responsible for continuing, even if they pre-date his watch originally. Ogley is up to his neck in malfeasances involving Syvret and Graham Power, and has been at the heart of every unsatisfactory piece of government policy of the last few years. I seem to remember that his reference was leading the implementation of hardline Tory cuts in Hertfordshire. Through the worst years of of Thatcher and Major, Jersey used to take pride in its wealth enabling it to do things that little bit better on the whole, but now our leaders want to catch up in their race to the bottom, and Ogley was seen as the man to do it.

Although it is rumoured that Jersey appears as a major producer in the accounts of a famous banana trading firm, it is not really a banana republic. Some would have it that The Jersey Way is just like one, but, in fact, very British attitudes predominate. Messrs Pollard and Ogley were sadly misled, if they were given the expectation that they were going to enjoy the levels of licence and impunity needed to get away with their style of doing things. And who so misled them?

Even if they had been induced to take up their posts by false pretences, the compensation given for their departure seems altogether disproportionate. And who saw fit to be so generous with our money, and, moreover, why?

The answers are of course that The Council of Ministers, and maybe a few close advisers, were who, and to induce them to take the rap for those behind them was why. However much initiative these men were supposed to exercise in carrying out their orders, and however much advice they gave as to what those orders should be, there can be no doubt which way the chain of command actually runs.

The whole sorry scandal is a sign that we have elected some unworthy leaders to the highest offices, if they will hire help to do such things, and need to buy their silence so expensively, when they fail to get away with them. We must choose more carefully next time: Although so much damage has already been done now, that nobody could fix it all in a term or two, we must stop adding to it.

Kings and Things

One of the big events of 2011 so far has been the wedding of Prince William, second in line to the British monarchy. It inspired a huge upwelling of popular affection for our Royal Family, that I must respect as a democrat, even if I am deeply disappointed in my compatriots as a republican. So, the opinion of the British people, and most certainly of Her Majesty's Government, is that a hereditary Head of State, to whom all mere elected officials are constitutionally answerable, is a Very Good Thing indeed.

What can have been so special about these peoples ancestors, that simply being their distant descendants is proof of fitness to rule? Just this; that the ultimate founder of every Royal House, seems to have been a charismatic soldier, able to both inspire their troops and terrify their subjects. Thus, the British monarchy bases its claim on putative descent from Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror, both of whom strongarmed their way to the English throne at the heads of bloodthirsty armies. (A team fronted by Tony Robinson spotted a glitch in the line of descent, for a TV show a few years ago, but the rightful heir they identified had renounced his peerage and settled in Australia as a common working man of republican views, and was not impressed by the news.) It therefore seems a reasonable deduction, that the establishment of monarchic dynasties by charismatic but terrifying soldiers should also be a Very Good Thing in the eyes of both the British people and their Government.

Another of 2011's big events is that when Libya's state stability suffered one of its occasional wobbles, several major Western Powers who should have known better pitched in to stave off defeat for the losing side.
The Arab region has just a clear idea of what a king should be as the West, and without the liberal traditions of post-Christian secularism to soften their thinking, generally expect and accept levels of good and bad behaviour from those who fill the role of king, that have long been relegated to children's fiction North of the Mediterranean Sea.

Muammar Ghaddafi is enough of a Twentieth Century Boy not to consider crowning himself, but he has shown all the hallmarks of a Great King in the way he has risen from his military background to put himself at the front of Libya's popular revolution and rule with a capricious mixture of genuine concern for the well-being of his subjects, savage disregard for the well-being of his enemies and sometimes wise, sometimes strange ideas for the bossing around of everybody. And he has been grooming his sons to carry on the family business.

Now, I can see how America or France could find a fig-leaf of moral principle, to dress a cynical attempt to put in a Libyan government that owes them a big favour, when it is time to sort out oil deals. But how, oh how can Her Majesty's government send Her Majesty's Forces to depose Colonel Ghaddafi for ruling in the very style Her Majesty's own authority derives from?

I must admit that I would not care to live in Ghaddafi's Libya, myself, but then I have not been raised with a head full of traditional Arab values, and I would be a sad misfit residing in any Arab country under any regime. My points are that Ghaddafi is not so bad by the values of his own civilisation, which is a neighbour of our own, not an extension of it, and that he embodies the very qualities our own nation sees as lying at its heart. Our pursuit of an unnecessary war against him is wasting resources and sacrificing lives in a grand act of arrogance and hypocrisy. His hands may be even less clean than the average long-serving statesman, but we really cannot indict him and justly leave our own aggressors, like Blair and now Cameron to go free.

School Milk Petition

Another off-topic comment on another thread worth starting a new one with:
Anonymous said...

Hi David,

Any observations on the schools milk petition ?

Thanks

26 May 2011 12:40
Delete
Blogger Ugh, It's Him! said...

Anonymous #11:

In the first place, I believe school milk is a good thing, but, in today's affluent and overfed society, a much less important good thing than it was at the time of its original introduction. I think they should have kept it, but asked parents to chip in towards the cost, but that option has never been on the table.
Regarding the petition; it is the kind of stunt that stops me regretting baling out of the JDA, and the undignified squabble between Geoff and Ted about whose petition it is diminishes both men. It is the 2,000 signatories' petition, if it is anybody's, and the front men owe it to the 2,000 to get on with presenting it, not drag it into their own quarrel.

26 May 2011 16:34

A Sporting Hero ?

Last year, I had a little grumble about the current crop of English professional football players. So, as a rest from all the scandals of Rooney and Cole and Terry and Lampard and whoever CTB may be, and so on, maybe I should give some praise to a model pro instead.

Strictly, I think he is Welsh rather than English, but Ryan Giggs has had an illustrious career in the English Premier League. He has loyally stuck with Manchester United throughout his career, too. I suppose that is easier when the only way out is down, but there are plenty of other players who have churned through United and other clubs of similar standing in pursuit of the fastest buck. He has looked after himself physically in a way that all professional sportsmen ought to but too few actually do, and remains an international grade outfield player at an age that only goalkeepers usually go on to.

What must be especially admired though, is that you never read of any scandal about him in the papers, only praise for his performances and the mighty haul of trophies those performances have brought. When our vigilantly investigative tabloids can not find any sordid tales they can print to enliven our Sundays, despite almost two decades in one of the most sleaze-ridden trades around, our hero Ryan must really be something special.

Unless, of course, he is just as bad of the rest of them, and all that is special is that he is canny enough to hire scarier lawyers than the others, so the tabloids have found sordid tales they can't print. Just a hypothetical possibility, naturally: A hero like him wouldn't really be like that, now would he?

"Tom Gruchy" on Disorganised Progressives

"Tom Gruchy" submitted this as a comment on another thread, but it is enough of a change of subject to deserve being a thread in its own right, too.

TOM GRUCHY says...
I too seem to be falling into Deputy T. Pitman's spam box and I raised similar sentiments to your well reasoned comment from anonymous.

It's the usual tittle tattle brigade who seem to take up so much space on Pitman's blog and the endless discussion about trolls - but so little discussion of important political and social issues. Not to mention the never ending failure to form a co-ordinated and effective opposition or even a viable alternative government.

The deplorable fact is that there are already more than enough so called "progressives" in the States to run rings around the likes of Le Sueur & Co if only they were prepared to bury their own egos for a few months. Preferably the few months left before Jersey's first ever General Election.

The history of "progressive representation" in Jersey really is a disgrce. The electorate can hardly be blamed - they have returned so called "progressives" to the States since Norman Le Brocq broke the mould - by the bus-load. But always the electorate has been let down.

Just do some counting and consider the likes of Joan Du Feu, Jimmy Johns, Jerry Dorey, Stuart Syvret, Imogen Nichols, Wendy Kinnard, Ted Vibert- but where is their political legacy now? They did not get elected solely through self effort - they were supported by groups of people who raised funds, leafleted, campaigned etc etc without any public recognition or reward. Why did they bother?

Soon, the usual solo prima donnas will be touting for support in the October beauty parade - but how many "progressives" do we need? If we had 27 in the States would they still be fighting amongst themselves and refusing to present agreed policies that have been agreed by the public?

As the "apathetic" public say - what is the point in voting for these people if they fail to deliver. Blame the system, blame the weather, blame whatever you want - but at the end of the day sometime in October - what is the point in voting?

Big Trev's New Website

My old JDA friend and colleague, Deputy Trevor Pitman now has his new personal website up and running at http://www.thebaldtruthjersey.co.uk in addition to a linked blog at http://www.thebaldtruth.blogspot.com

Go visit!!

Human Resources Are Too Precious To Scrap Before Time

The recent announcement, that the States intend to make most people wait a little longer to become Old Age Pensioners, is a necessary consequence of the way that most people are getting old more slowly in this time of unprecedentedly good public health. More years of pension being drawn must need either higher deductions or a longer period of them, if not both, to remain affordable.

However, I hope that they are going to join up the thinking on this. There are a lot of employers who follow good practice in allowing the willing to work on past their official retirement age. Sadly, there also plenty more with no shame in taking an “ageist” approach to their human resources management. There would be benefits both to the individuals concerned and to Jersey as a society and economy, if there were to be legal constraints placed on employers' freedom to put their workers on the street just for exceeding an arbitrary number of birthdays. Unless they couple the change with a move to outlaw compulsory retirement of employees before state pension age, they are going to accumulate a pile of very mature unemployed, too old to appeal to most “Human Resources” or Personnel Managers, who are just drawing Income Support instead of Old Age Pension, and still putting no more into the pot. The need is for people to work for longer, not merely wait for their pensions for longer.

For those whose circumstances permit it, it is a fine thing to be able to devote one's life to leisure and, maybe, voluntary work before one has grown too frail. On the other hand, there are many more who can still work, when they reach nominal retirement age, and would rather continue to earn a real wage than struggle on a pension.

For individuals, the fall in income spells at best a sharp reduction in their standard of living, and quite possibly real hardship, especially for those whose employers can currently insist on retiring them before States Pension age.

For Jersey as a whole, maximising the years of work from each person helps to address two perennial problems. Firstly, to fill the job that has been vacated, another worker must be found, and that person may have to be imported, aggravating the overpopulation: Keeping people as economically active instead of replacing them as employees and adding them to the pension burden makes economic sense. Secondly, Social Security and Pension funding has long been difficult.

A parallel change to ending compulsory retirement, in which the many who have not spent their entire working life in Jersey could continue to pay contributions to add to their credits beyond their eligible retirement date, instead of claiming the pension, would both help the fund's income, and improve the lot of the workers, when they do decide that they are ready to retire.

Perhaps the “establishment” and “anti-establishment” groupings in the States could take a break from the point-scoring and get together on this matter, as something where they could make a positive difference for many islanders, for once.

A Credible Opposition

I think that most of my readers will be familiar with Jersey politics. If you aren't, it has a dominant clique with real power and some backbenchers, who get a modest salary for achieving more or less nothing, however hard they work. This inability of the backbenchers to achieve useful input is a fairly new problem, arising from the “reform” of introducing ministerial government. Previously, almost everybody sat in on the committees that formerly controlled departments.

This removal of any effective check or influence on ministerial power is a matter of concern to those who follow local politics, other than supporters of incumbent ministers, of course. Soon there will be a campaign launching, to call for the creation of a credible opposition.

I wonder, though, what the promoters of this campaign foresee as the fruit of the project. I presume that the first step is to find more high-calibre candidates with left-wing or centre-left views. However, that particular talent pool may well prove rather shallow. It would not surprise me if the best are not either already backbench States members, or well-known activists, whom everyone expects to stand in due course. Then there is the matter of forming a coherent opposition, unlike the current situation, where the same third of the House usually vote against the ministerial line, but are united more by their rejection of the other side than any shared vision.

All over the world, coherence is the product of parties. I think, therefore that the way forward will have to be yet another attempt to found a party, building on the ruins of past failures such as the fast-fading JDA and the long gone and forgotten Rainbow Alliance. But, it is hard to sell to good candidates the discipline of party politics, when they know they are facing an electorate with a proven track records for liking colourful mavericks.

Suppose we do get Jersey's Next Party established though. Unless the JNP have enough members and allies in office, that they need only persuade a handful of ministerial acolytes to change sides on a particular vote, they can still do no more than talk. And even the talking is being reined in, as there has been a reaction to the habit one particularly intellectual backbencher has, of speaking over the bony heads of the less clever but more powerful members for literally hours on end.

The only time an opposition can be strong, is when it is a government-in-waiting. If all it does is to get on with the job of opposing, it is reduced to protest and gesture. Those may garner support, as they articulate public dissatisfaction, but they do not in themselves give any very reassuring answer to the question “So, can you do any better, then?”. Thus, a credible opposition must focus its effort not on opposition itself, but on developing alternative policies that will inherently be in opposition to the ministerial ones. And, the trick that Labour and Conservative in Westminster, and Democrat and Republican in Washington so often miss, is to give principled and ungrudging support to the incumbent government when they do what their opposition wanted to do, too. Nothing, apart from bribery and corruption, makes politicians look sleazier than objecting to a good thing for selfish tactical reasons: The public want good government, not petty point-scoring.

While having a Plan B for being the opposition is prudent, it should not be the prime objective of the JNP anyway. Those alternative policies must be blueprints for government, not just pie-in-the-sky dreams to blame the establishment for not adopting. If the JNP is going to develop sound and attractive policies, and field enough electable candidates to carry some weight in the next House, then it becomes at least possible, although not odds-on, that it could end up being or dominating the government. Then we could look forward to a very credible opposition with the likes of Messrs Ozouf, Gorst and Routier. I quite like the idea of that kind of talent packing the opposition benches, and would be happy to see them as a government-in-waiting that waits a very long time indeed.

Good Article

The economist and thinker, Richard Murphy has a very interesting piece that would appeal to the kind of people who read this blog at here

Try to be Hard in the Cold, and You May Well End up Stiff, Instead

Recently, the usually pampered lives of professional soccer players have seen the banning of snood scarves, particularly popular with immigrant players from warm countries in British or European winter weather. Moreover, there has been some nostalgic harping on about how much tougher players used to be when they did not dress so warmly.

I doubt that, myself. There is a tradition in the colder parts of England that only weaklings are “nesh”, or sensitive to cold, but those who would challenge the might of the weather with courage alone often end up paying the highest price. The UK sees a five figure surplus mortality over the summer months each winter. Yet most of Europe has harsher winters without this effect.

So, why? Because everywhere else, they respect the cold and dress against it. Even without actually developing hypothermia, the thickened blood, restricted circulation and impaired breathing of the thoroughly chilled impose heavy and adverse loads on the body, that can escalate underlying problems from the trivial to the fatal.

But apart from the health hazards, that are probably minimal to professional athletes in their prime, there is the performance loading that sub-lethal hypothermia brings. Getting severely cold not only saps strength but dulls mental performance too: It slows reactions and little by little turns common sense to a pseudo-drunken irrationality. Far from pouring scorn on those wise enough to try to avoid or mitigate these problems, the bravely cold should learn and imitate. My employer recently added snoods to the kit they issue us for working in the cold, and they work.

We cannot go on heating our homes quite as lavishly as we have been doing in the last quarter-century, but we need to be sensible about keeping ourselves warm, indoors and out. Half a million or so Britons sacrificed to misplaced pride in their toughness every decade is far too high a toll. A footballer in a snood is not a big cissy, he is the future, one large step ahead of his detractors and a fine example to follow. This ill-considered reaction should be rescinded, and soon.

As a lot of my two dozen or so readers are political types, there is another angle worth mentioning: Although I started by considering elite professional sportsmen, the real damage from cold weather is borne mainly by the old and infirm. However tight welfare gets in a crashed economy, the next most important thing to sufficient food to provide for the needy is the means or access to at least one warm room. Save in high summer, fuel is an essential, not a luxury in Britain's climate.

Notice

Emille’s Funeral will be held on Wednesday at 10.45 am at the Crematorium followed by a meeting at the Old Magistrates Court (back of Town Hall) from 1145am.Family, friends and former colleagues are welcome to attend.
By voiceforchildren

An Even Smaller World

Jersey online politics is a very small world. Last week it got even smaller with the sudden loss of the Haut de la Garenne Farce Blog. If you read this you probably used to read that too, but in case anyone didn't, it was a rather unpredictable and uneven blog by a couple of people calling themselves Gazza and Andy, with guest articles by Senators Perchard and le Main and, they claimed, some anonymous others. It occupied a unique and important niche as the only independent right-wing local website known to the little clique of Jersey bloggers and forum posters, apart from a handful of one-or-two-posts-a-year personal blogs. Sometimes it sailed very close to the wind with posting things that seemed to defy copyright and data protection law with the same insolent disregard as they defied good taste, when publishing material aimed at embarrassing people it saw as threats. And it seems that somebody tipped the owners off about trouble brewing, because its disappearance seems to have a link to the latest political bombshell to hit Jersey.

Deputy Sean Power has been obliged to resign as Housing Minister for copying and leaking an email from a former politician that had been forwarded from one fellow States Member to another. Mr Power himself feels that this was merely a pretext to get rid of him, but I think most people would consider such gross invasion of privacy a resigning matter. We must of course take his word that it was not his copy, but another, that found its way onto the internet. However, it is fair to reflect on how unfortunate for him it was that the blog that published the stolen email, to the mortification of its proper recipient, was one he had reputed links with. For it was HdlGFarce Blog. Mr Power's close colleague, Terry le Main was a contributor, and the consensus used to be that if the “anonymous States Member” was not Gazza pretending to false credentials, then they were most likely to be Sean Power. They certainly gave the impression of being a “source close to him” as the cliché goes. Real offence, embarrassment and damage to reputation was caused by the email Mr Power handled without authority being published by the blog he had at least an indirect association with. Even if it was truly coincidental that the blog got hold of the same email, Mr Power was still in an untenable position, and had to go.

Gazza and Andy, of course, are as free to close their blog on a whim any time they please as I am to close this one. But, to be honest, they also seemed about as likely to do so. So one wonders what spooked them. For instance, could it have been a warning on the lines of “Hey, Gazza, Data Protection are looking into that email I gave you, to be sure, and they won't be liking that dating agency thing you're running now, either, if they look. I think you'd better be closing the blog down, so I do, before we get into even more trouble.”? No, we must reject that possibility. Even so, it seems to me that there is grounds for a little doubt about whether Mr Power has told the whole truth in as clear a manner as possible.

PS: HdlGF has now reappeared as a public blog, shorn of illicit material. Welcome back to Gazza and Andy, and thanks to Tony for drawing attention to its reappearence.

Cargo Cult Politics

I don't know for sure whether this is truth or just a very plausible urban myth: In the early 1940's the USA were fighting a war against Japan across the Pacific Ocean, amongst other simultaneous and related conflicts. They posted American garrisons on numerous islands, and supplied them at least in part by parachute drops on the makeshift airstrips. The indigenous Polynesians, with a sharp eye for the detail of the process, but no clue about the wider picture, took to marking out their own imitation airstrips in the vain hope of tempting the sky-gods to drop them some free provisions, too. I have no idea whether any confused airman ever did accidentally encourage them in their error by mistaking the native sites for the US Army drop zones, but they allegedly persisted for some years with a “cargo cult”, believing, with more modest theology and vastly more evidence than the world's major religions, that, if they only marked out the ground exactly right, free food would come out of the sky for them.

I shall return to that subject to make a comparison, later, but next I must take a different approach towards my point.

Jersey politics has had a very weak party tradition in recent decades. There have been a handful of minor parties come and go over the years, but in my lifetime they have always been swamped by the independents, in a reversal of the usual order where the major parties compete against one another while the independents constitute the political jungle's undergrowth. Most informed observers agree that there has been a bloc of powerful politicians acting as a de facto party, but the informality of the arrangement saves them from the usual degree of accountability to their activists, let alone their voters.

Many politically interested people would prefer there to be normal party politics, as enjoyed by most of the free world, but it is a weary task to bring it about. I myself have been involved in two attempts to launch a party somewhere to the left of the ruling non-party, one of which soon disintegrated, and the other of which is approaching its fifth anniversary in rather poor shape.

The Jersey Democratic Alliance set out to be a proper, quasi-professional organised party, drawing heavily on founder Ted Vibert's years of experience in the Australian Labour Party, as well as Geoff Southern and Tony Keogh's backgrounds as UK Labour Party supporters in their youth. It has a carefully written formal constitution with fairly clear, but not impracticably restricted aims. It is structured like a real party, and takes pains to present itself like a real party. Jersey needs at least one and preferably three more parties to make party politics work here again, though. And, at present there are none. Should you google the Jersey Conservative Party, you will find an internet presence of sorts, but the party itself really could meet in a telephone box, were the second member a more delicately built man. And there is no longer anything else.

So, we do not have a functional party system, and any hope of developing one is still over the horizon. Worse though, is that, instead of providing a template for its future rivals, the JDA has itself lapsed into profound dysfunctionality.

In its early years, the hope of the JDA was to provide some alternative policies by which the island could be governed. Even if it did not command an actual majority, a bloc holding the balance of power would have had enough leverage to see through at least some of its manifesto. That, to me seemed the fundamental purpose of a political party. However, as the years dragged by with nothing of substance achieved, the attention of the party leadership has gradually shifted to the other things that parties do: Insult and bully their opposite numbers – check. Indulge in rabble-rousing publicity stunts – check. Put out glossy pamphlets of insubstantial spin – check. Get with the 21st Century by putting the pamphlet content and more on a slick professionally run website – check. But all those things are incidental activities, not the core purpose. The PR Quango Jersey Finance can boast of getting laws in double figures passed every year, whereas the JDA, a proper party, achieves little more than an occasional amendment. But legislation and administrative policy are its core purposes. If it is neither providing those, nor substantially influencing those who do for the better, then it is fundamentally failing.

The spin and insults and stunts are cargo-cult politics, the lights along the edge of the strip. If they are not laying them around the real drop zone then they are so much wasted effort. There is enough wisdom gathered in the JDA leadership to know better than what they are now doing, at heart. For party politics to prosper once more here, however, they need to return to a clear focus on alternative policies to the establishment non-party, that challenges the supporters of both the mainstream and other alternative policies to likewise organise and formalise the promotion of their own viewpoints.

Unless the mainland UK parties set up local branches, which is unlikely, given the different priorities and occasional conflicting interests of our island politics, there is not really the scale to operate as if our parties were Westminster or Washington operations. Jersey parties must by necessity be mainly amateur operations, perhaps hiring a freelance expert or contractor for some tasks, but all of them too small to carry any paid staff. Thus, they must take care to distinguish between the trappings of a national party and the core business of any party, and concentrate on the latter. The JDA are failing to do this at present, and so letting down all those voters they would or used to speak for. The General Election is now only a few months away. They need to be living down the futile and embarrassing stunts like putting a sitting member into a by-election or presenting a petition that shows that a minority of people would like to have the Treasury Minister sacked, and, instead, setting the agenda for the Election campaign by laying out clear and credible policy alternatives once again. Promoting a lecture on how the finance industry could survive a global clampdown on tax avoidance by Richard Murphy was a good start; now they need to go down that road in earnest.

Interesting Meeting Next Week

The famous or infamous, according to your perspective, economist Richard Murphy will be in Jersey for a public meeting on the topic “Jersey – Let finance work for you” at Hautlieu on 24th January at 7pm. He is looking forward to debating with his critics, as well as meeting his supporters, so it should be a lively and interesting meeting, wherever your own standpoint is.

Autres Temps, Autres Moeurs

Last week's conviction of the Jordans marks the end of the official action in respect of child abuse at Haut de la Garenne a generation ago, and the final flurry of publicity about it. By coincidence, while the Haut de la Garenne scandal has been refreshed in my mind, I have also been reading “Boy”, the non-fiction reminiscences of his own childhood by the mid 20th Century author Roald Dahl.

Dahl's book sheds light on the inspiration for the various bullies, sadists, ogres and psychopaths that so dominate his fiction. He paints a grim picture of life in upmarket private sector schools in the inter-war years. Boys were frequently beaten savagely with canes for trivial misdemeanors, or even mere unfounded suspicion of them. One incident he recounted was of the Matron filling the mouth of a snoring boy with soap flakes to stop him. Soap in a child's mouth struck me as having a resonance with the tales of the abusive “carers” in Jersey's Children's Service.

The question that has so perturbed us in the pampered 21st Century has been “How could they have allowed such things to go on?”. As I closed the book after reading the chapter about The Matron, I suddenly saw the answer:

The upper-middle class boys Dahl went to school with were being prepared to become officers and gentlemen in manhood. Perhaps they were somewhat damaged as individuals by the process, but the pay-off was that they left school able to submit to harsh and rigid discipline and able to face painful physical injury with calm courage and fortitude. In a time when there were major wars to be fought, their country needed men like these as leaders on the battlefield, and it had them in adequate supply.

But as well as being the officer class in war, they were also the professional class in peace. And they brought their battle-ready public school values to their civilian careers, too. Moreover, most public school boys were proud enough of their education to wish it on their own offspring, in turn.

Dahl's generation would have been the senior lawyers and administrators of Haut de la Garenne's most controversial days. In their own boyhoods, their fathers would have paid good money to have them brutally physically and psychologically abused, and called it giving them a good education. They would also have signed most of their own sons up to more of the same. How could we expect these men to have raised an eyebrow at the regime that prevailed in most children's homes of the day? These poor orphans were being treated to the key features of an expensive public school education for free. It is all very well for us to look back now and say such things have no place in our society in 2011. It wasn't 2011, it was 1965 or 70, and it was their call that such things did have a place in their society, then.

I can fully sympathise with feelings of the care leavers that their sufferings have still not been sufficiently acknowledged, let alone compensated. Dahl wrote his disturbingly vivid account of institutional child abuse nearly sixty years afterwards, and he made it plain that he still seethed with rankling resentment of his experiences. But, to be fair, the only valid context, in which to judge what was done then, is against the values of the time. Thus, I don't think there is much hope of any bigger apologies or gestures coming forth. We must simply be grateful that this is one respect in which the world has changed for the better.

However, in saying that 1965's child care should be judged by 1965 standards, I imply the corollary that 2011's child care should be judged by 2011 standards. This is quite another can of worms. It seems, from the occasional report or investigation, that Jersey's Children's Service has not kept pace, and too much still goes on that would have been all in the game forty years or more ago, but no longer is acceptable in the more enlightened and caring society that we like to think we have become since.. Then may have been then, but now is now. Jersey needs to catch up.

How Appropriate!

The award of the Order of the British Empire to Jersey's controversial former Chief Minister Frank Walker has provoked widespread approbation, but still more widespread anger. Even some fairly apolitical types have been raging that such a man should be so honoured.

However, it seems to me that, if one considers what the British Empire was, that an OBE is a somewhat backhanded compliment, that Mr Walker is in fact quite worthy of.

In its heyday, the British Empire, as all empires, was built by military and economic coercion and maintained by patronage, to the purpose of diverting much of the wealth of the colonies and other subject territories to the élite classes of the Home Countries; the aristocrats and plutocrats. A local suzereign would be allowed his prestige and circumscribed power so long as he oversaw that transfer of riches to the Westminster government, and more importantly, to those who pulled its strings, and all those directly concerned with the repatriation and the upholding of the imperial link gained reflected prestige in turn.

Such empires have ever been unstable things, prone to either wholesale collapse or apical revolution, if not both, and Britain's turn came to have to let go within a few years of reaching its peak. However, there are still many relict institutions from those days, and the Order of the British Empire is one of them.

Jersey is close enough to mainland Britain in every way not to have been an imperial possession in the usual sense, but even so, there seems to be strong parallels with the imperial process in the relationship with the finance industry. Like the Israelites in “The Life Of Brian”, the answer to “What has the finance industry ever done for us?” turns out to be rather a lot, but, like them, the long term price for it will be not far short of complete destruction, and the short term price is some relative discomfort for all those not directly working for the colonising powers.

The finance industry has been nice work while we can get it, although, admittedly, not the most honest living Jersey could have made. However, it was hardly sustainable to opportunistically cash in on unintended defects in other jurisdictions' tax regimes, and it can only be expected that the more successful offshore tax affair management becomes, the more it becomes worthwhile for our victim states to revise their laws to keep their tax at home and turn our money supply off at the mains. Even an insider and stalwart defender memorably admitted that it could all “leave at the click of a mouse” a few years ago, and that was before the 2008 credit crunch destabilised the global finance industry.

Given the obvious lack of future prospects, it was rather perverse of the States to devote a couple of decades to building the finance industry to a size where the formerly sustainable tourism and agricultural industries were crushed and pushed aside. It was a handy sideline, but now it has instead become a harsh master.

The most obvious damage so far has been in the bloated and distorted property market. The past willingness of Jersey banks to lend massive multiples of salary for mortgages has inflated the housing market to a level where few can afford to buy, and few can afford to sell, either. All the interest on these huge loans is creamed off out of our own economy to the UK banks, of course.

Now the governing clique that Mr Walker once fronted has rearranged our economy to be utterly dependent on the revenue, in both salaries to local employees and tax to our government, provided by the finance industry, the trap has sprung: They will not keep paying those vital salaries here unless we forgo a large chunk of the tax they used to also provide. So, now the three-quarters of the workforce who do not have our snouts in the finance trough have moved from having our taxes subsidised by the finance industry, which was the great justification, to having to subsidise their taxes instead, lest the loss of all those jobs takes all ours with them. While that is not the worst thing to happen here in living memory, nor is it exactly good.

So, we are still getting by for now. Offshore finance as we have known it for the last half-century is probably in its sunset years, as the major economies wise up to how much money that they could have done with at home is slipping away from them and seal the loopholes. All too soon, there will be a sharp decline in how much profit can be successfully and safely hidden in tax havens, and a corresponding decline in how much business it pays anybody to put our way. And then, having run down the rest of our economy, we shall face a devastating slump. The flats and offices that so characterise the Walker clique's rule will be left vacant as the staff are withdrawn to the mainland or let go altogether. But they were built on his watch, and symbolise the priority given to the short-term profit of developers and financial institutions from elsewhere in his policies. For all the posturing about tough decisions, making a fast buck for somebody consistently came before building a future for islanders in general.

The combination of upholding the glory of the Crown and its institutions, and helping the powerful elsewhere keep more of their money than they really should, and be paid more of ours than they should, too, is enough to justify Frank Walker being honoured in the name of the British Empire.

There is another angle to this, though. When even sleazy pop singers can earn knighthoods for being successful, what does it say about the official view of how well Mr Walker performed his service, that he only rates a mere second-rung OBE for it? Surely someone so long a senior dignitary could expect to be feeling the flat of Her Majesty's sword on his shoulder for it all. Perhaps it is less an honour than a snub, really. After all, he is widely despised within Jersey and remembered more for handling the Haut de la Garenne affair maladroitly than anything else without.

Frank Walker had a catchphrase, “We are where we are.” with which he used to justify unpopular expediencies. Being fobbed off with this tinpot gong is all he deserves, for we are indeed where we are, and he has left us up there without a paddle.

Oops! Ben 's Let The Cat Out Of The Bag

I have been so disgruntled with what has been going on in the States of Jersey in the last few weeks that I have been lost for words. However, Ben Shenton said something in Tuesday's paper that quite shocked me. Not the content, everybody who follows local politics suspects there is too much of that about, but that he openly said so.

I have dashed off a letter to the JEP about it, but, on consideration, I have decided to blog it as well:-

Senator Ben Shenton(JEP, 26th October) has really hit the nail on the head, as to why there is so much dissatisfaction with our government amongst the general public. Two telling phrases, that were worth banner headlines rather than quietly tucking away on page 9: “The States Assembly is becoming more and more irrelevant as the seat of government” and “the real decisions are made outside of the States”.

There, at last, we have it admitted by one who should know; it all gets sewn up in behind the scene fixes. For decades, the number one excuse of the politically disengaged has been that it is a waste of time, because the real power is, they believe, exercised at the Yacht Club, Golf Club or Masonic Temple. Indeed, it does often seem as if votes are cast in accordance with a prior plan, rather than on the merits of the arguments raised in debate, and the “opposition”, such as it is ,seems just as guilty in this regard.

Yet the essence of a functional parliamentary democracy is that the debates do matter, and that the members cast their votes in good faith on the strength of the points made, and the background reports read. The worldly wise may harbour suspicions that sometimes the motions are gone through for show, while the real negotiations happen in private, but it is those motions that carry the actual authority; the backroom dealing only subverts that authority, not overrules it.

Now the players are starting to admit that it is just a show, the basis of the States' authority, as the democratic representatives in a real process, is vitiated. Our centuries old tradition of governing ourselves has been shown to have broken down. Now we need real and urgent change to repair it, or else we shall have to admit that it has failed us, and throw in our lot with Westminster, instead. Downgraded to borough council status, the States would have to toe a much straighter line.

However, it would be better, if we could contrive to set our own house in order. Senator Shenton's idea of external decision making is just a recipe for corruption, and a hazard to Jersey's viability in a world where the ethical expectations for financial centres is rising ever higher.

An Empty Pot at the End of the Rainbow

At long last we have the Napier Report, that was going to resolve all the disputation about the removal of Jersey's Chief Constable, Graham Power. And it didn't.

The bottom line was a very carefully worded conclusion that Mr Napier could find no independent evidence of a conspiracy. Not that he was confident that there was no conspiracy, mind you, he just had a lack of independent evidence. As though any potentially incriminating notes had been carefully shredded, or something.

In a court of law, in most jurisdictions including Jersey, if someone can not be found guilty beyond reasonable doubt, then they must be acquitted without stain on their character, presumed in the eyes of the law to be wholly innocent. Mr Power's many enemies, therefore took Mr Napier's conclusion to be a complete exoneration of the officials who removed him.

But, the Napier Report was not a trial, just an independent investigation, with no more power to acquit than it had to convict. And, the Napier Report did cite most of the circumstantial evidence that most neutral or pro-Power observers took as indications of a conspiracy, and made trenchant criticism of the way things were done. Not being a judicial verdict, but being an officially authorised opinion, these criticisms do reflect shame on their objects, and, worse, doubt on the competence of our present government. As if there were not enough of that, already.

So, in fact the Napier Report does rather more to support the view that there was something untoward about Mr Power's removal, than it does to clear the names of his superiors. Of course, it remains a matter of speculation as to why there was such a desperate rush to get rid of him. The idea that the child abuse investigation was going to eventually lead into embarrassingly high places remains tenable, but perhaps a little far-fetched. The Curtis Warren case happened on his watch, too, and HMP La Moye is not the standard of accommodation that Jersey usually likes to offer millionaire immigrants, so that might have upset somebody. The anti-corruption drive in the States of Jersey Police certainly trod on some well-connected toes, and owed favours may have been called in to pay him back. Power may simply have rubbed people, who thought they should have been sucked up to more, up the wrong way, so they looked for a more agreeable replacement. And what must now be the front-runner, in the absence of the clinching evidence that Napier failed to find, is that the higher powers were genuinely concerned that, despite the approval of the UK police organisations called in for expert advice, the Haut de la Garenne case had been conducted with gross incompetence, so they simply exercised some gross incompetence of their own in how they went about sacking him for it.

Not one of those possibilities reassures me that I am under sound government. Napier may have implied that there was no case for any more heads to roll, but there are now some thoroughly discredited men clinging to office.

Did the Biggest Billy Goat Gruff Kill Him?

Jersey's online community seems to have a missing person. OK, maybe we miss him like an aching tooth, but the poor man has not only vanished, but his tracks are being erased.

I am, of course, discussing my old sparring partner from various websites, Jason “the Maverick” Roberts. Jason used to appear to be a stereotypical internet troll, lonely, angry and snide, defending the Jersey establishment's corner against all those who dared suggest that there were some serious but curable blemishes in our island's approach to certain social and ethical issues.

Jason has gone, though. His memberships of the forum sites have been closed. His Facebook account has been closed, although I still have a message from it to show that it was not a figment of my memory. Remarkably, Jersey's newest blog followers are even starting to question whether the legendary Jason ever existed. Very curiously, the blog that hosted those questions refuses to likewise host answers to them, as if they have a vested interest in erasing poor Jason. And another forum site, once linked to Jason, but supposedly now free of him, has erased reference to that discussion, and even banned one of the members that mentioned it.

Nevertheless, from a hint here and a snippet there I now have a sort of picture of Jason, albeit like a view through a Venetian blind, when you can't be quite sure that the gaps are necessarily consistent with the bits you can see, but those bits are consistent with each other.

So, what do I know, or at least have read, about him? Jason Roberts once published the following details about himself, although in a context where deliberate inaccuracy was wholly appropriate: FULL NAME - JASON ROBERTS
NATIONALITY - BRITISH
GENDER - MALE
HOME/OFFICE ADDRESS - 203 BEACH ROAD, ST HELIER, JERSEY, JE4 6TY.
TELEPHONE - 07797122444
AGE - 39
OCCUPATION - VENTRILOQUIST
However, in his usual trolling guise, he claimed to be a financial services manager, with comprehensive inside knowledge of the industry, busily arranging offshore vehicles for a burgeoning list of squeaky-clean overseas clients.
Stuart Syvret's Blog, an interesting, but not altogether trustworthy source, identified Jason as really being one Jon Haworth. More recently, someone claiming to be Jon Haworth, told me he used to co-write Jason's stuff, but not any more. Very recently, Jon told fellow blogger Rico Sorda that he co-wrote it with a partner now dead.
When I first started blogging, I was warned, by an ex-blogger who had inspired me, to beware of Jason Roberts, a physically intimidating man from the Spectrum Apartments.
The JEP reported the unfortunate death of a certain Yann Roberts, then of Spectrum but formerly of Beach Road, from the after-effects of a scuffle with doorstaff, who had found him physically intimidating enough to need rough handling on the way out.
Gary Cummins, the author of the Haut de la Garenne Farce blog has a similar style and attitude to Jason, is just as evasive when it comes to evidence of his own real-life existence, and gets very hot under the collar at any mention of Jason other than to doubt that he ever was.

I reckon this is becoming enough to start trying to construct some sort of narrative. Doubtless, some of the guesses that bridge the gaps won't be quite right, but I think Jon is smart enough to realise that being guessed about is the price of not letting people know about you. Anyway, here goes:-

Once upon a time, (as stories about trolls should begin) a couple of grumpy young men took a sour look at the burgeoning local blog and forum scene, and decided to brighten their own bleak lives up with a little mischief making. So, they put their heads together to create a mythic anti-hero combining the surly aggression of one creator with the snide argumentativeness of the other. So, from the early triumph of getting their puppet appointed Gay Rights Advisor (sarcastically, I think) by Why Guernsey, they spread Jason The Maverick's presence around all the other local discussion sites as they opened. Forever scorning, forever challenging, and forever ducking counter challenges. Although, Jon as Jason did once engage properly with something I wrote, and it turned out that we weren't all that far apart in our views, when he was being serious, even if we came to them by different routes.

The zenith of Jason The Maverick's success was when Adrian Walsh launched Planet Jersey, and Jason was invited to be one of the original moderators. This gave “him”, or them, more power than responsibility, and they revelled in the scope it gave them to skew the debates. However, they overdid things, damaging the site by driving users away and undermining its credibility by adding further bogus identities to either agree with Jason or disagree with deliberately embarrassing inanity. Eventually Planet Jersey had to declare that Jason had been banned. Curiously, he seems to retain access to the restricted areas of the site, and the committed loyalty of the remaining PJ team. It would be completely unsurprising, if it were to be revealed one day that Jon actually remains an integral part of that team, merely with a lower profile than before.

However, after the public shamings of PJ's repudiation and Stuart Syvret's characteristically nasty exposé, and the unexpected sticky end of the man who gave him half his name, “Jason” lost his appetite for trolling and flaming and faded away over the next few months.

Without “Jason's” scripts to write, poor Jon found his life a little empty, and eventually resolved to take his revenge by creating a new online persona for a more sophisticated project. So, he became Gary “Gazza” Cummins, possibly with a new co-writer, possibly with a fictional one. The partner being “Andy”, perhaps named after Jersey's other prolific troll, Andy “Spartacus” Hurley, perhaps a namesake, quite possibly the man himself. [edit: not the man himself, according to a comment received]

The new project was a blog combining well-written, serious articles taking a heterodox look at Jersey's child abuse scandals, thus cutting his tormentor Syvret down to size, grumpy opinion pieces allegedly by an anonymous, but more likely a fictitious, local politician, and woefully badly written pieces credibly attributed to English-as-second-language Jerriais politician Terry le Main. The articles are finer work than anything that ever went out over Jason the Maverick's byline, but the very lightly moderated comments are for the most part appallingly crass, and strikingly reminiscent of the discussions JTM used to conduct with his own alternative logins on Planet Jersey. There is a link on the left to the HDLGF blog; it is an interesting read for the open minded, but don't look at the comments if you are the sensitive type.

So it seems to me that, after the Biggest Billy Goat Gruff got him, Jason just swam downstream to another bridge, and went back into his old business. We need not mourn his loss, after all.

Salute to a Veteran

I had the privilege of attending the 98th Birthday party thrown for Emile Collins at the Town Hall this afternoon. He is physically somewhat bowed by age, but this remarkable and inspirational man's brain and wit remain as sharp as ever. He is well into his seventh decade of political activism, but he is still standing up to be counted at every opportunity, and standing behind those who campaign for Jersey's ordinary people. If I am lucky enough to still be alive and in my right mind at his age, I shall remember him, and owe it to his memory to keep on standing up for my beliefs and my fellow islanders, too. For now though, he is still a presence, not a memory, and still talks good sense on Jersey politics. Let us treasure him.
Check out Voice for Jersey blog if you don't know who I am on about; they currently have a good article on him running.

Ugh, It's .....!

It seems that the restrictions on exercising dogs on beaches are still not strict enough.

The other day my family and I were just leaving the sand at St Brelade's Bay, when one of my daughters pointed out a fine specimen of a dog, that had just arrived. However, after we had admired it for a few seconds, it squatted with an arched back. Its walker promptly came over, and I naively remarked “That's good – he is going to scoop it up.” Alas, I had sadly overestimated the man. Instead of removing the pollution, he dug it a couple of inches into the surface of the sand with a few deft sweeps of his shoe. And it did not occur to him that my shout of “That will be a nice surprise for some lucky kid, tomorrow!” might have been addressed to him.

So, if we have a situation where dog owners cannot tell prime family leisure beaches from giant litter trays, then we need to defend our beaches by not allowing our poor, confused cynophiles to bring their pets at all, at any time of day or night, or at least banishing them to a few remote locations that can be designated Dog Beaches and shunned by the rest of us.

The nature of dogs' metabolisms and digestions makes their droppings more harmful than those of other common domestic animals, as well as more disgusting. If dog owners will not respect their fellow humans of their own free will, then we must compel their respect by curtailing the freedoms that they abuse.

A Really Batty Blog!

Human affairs are obviously of paramount importance to we humans, but it is good to spend a little time and attention on the lives of other creatures that share our planet. Nature programmes on the television are a good start, but there is more joy to be had in observing wildlife at first hand, even little stuff. Thus, I make little effort to rid my garden of insect life, bar ants in the house walls and wasps in the shed, and it is surprising how much you can find by simply looking closely. An hour's bug-watching will show you a greater selection of interesting creatures than a day of chasing big cats on the African savannah, albeit smaller and less scary ones, and all for free.

Last night, though, our insect-friendly garden paid off in a big way, with one of the most spectacular displays we have ever seen, of any sort. I like to see bats hunting in the evening twilight, and often glance out of the window at sunset to see whether I can see one. This time I got an impression that there were two or three right in front of our house. My wife, elder daughter and I all fancied a closer look, so we went outside and took one. There turned out to be half-a-dozen bats, probably pipistrelles, zooming around a little patch centring on our garden. For about a quarter of an hour, we were enthralled by a wonderful aerobatic display as the bats swooped and swerved to gather invisibly tiny flies, dodging between each other with supreme skill, and at times just three feet in front of our faces. With their broad wings and tiny momentum, they can perform astonishingly tight manoeuvres. Sadly, they were too quick for my camera, and all I could take were a few brown blurs.

If you, too have the good fortune to live in a low enough density settlement to sustain bats, which is most places, then it is worth looking out for them at sunset on fine summer evenings. I can't promise a free air show like we have just had every time, but, in order to get one, you have to start by looking.

England Used To Expect...

Although my home is Jersey, I am one of the many English people here, not a French-descended Jérriais. So, although I am not as dedicated a follower of football as many I know, I do like to watch the occasional big match, especially if it involves the England team.

Some of Britain's proudest contributions to the rest of the world have been our sports: Most international sports are either of British origin, or are the British versions of ancient sports. The most successful of all our sporting exports is soccer.

As a boy, I spent hundreds of school breaks playing in informal games, like billions of other boys all around the world. So I have a pretty firm idea of what the game is about.

International football provides an interesting medium for the expression of national cultures or characters. Eastern European teams are usually rather dour, African teams are passionate and fiery, Asian teams are disciplined and short of big stars and South Americans dominate everyone with their dazzling mixtures of individual skill, smart teamwork and ferocious will to win. And England, not only the home of soccer, but former motherland of an empire that spanned the globe and perennial winner of a millennium of wars expects its team to match them all with sharp tactics and indomitable spirit. Like many other nations, our soccer team is an emblem of our national pride, and we look for fine displays of heroic attack and defence linked up by shrewd midfield play and backed up by solid goalkeeping.

So, the 2010 World Cup has been a shocking experience for my country. The schadenfreude we should have felt at two of football's other great powers making ignominious exits in the group stages – France and Italy - was tempered by our own boys scraping a lucky draw against a team from humble Algeria, who totally outplayed our side. England's team did not even look as good as an amateur Sunday team in that match, and yet there was far, far worse to come.

Sunday's Big Match against our traditional foes, on football field and battlefield alike, was to be the cue for England's team to finally show what they were made of. Well, we found out, all right. At least David James, the goalkeeper, lived up to the country's reputation for top-grade goalkeeping. It is not often that a goalie wins praise for conceding four goals, but, in the circumstances, only letting in four of the long series of sitters the “team”, if that is the word for such an unco-ordinated rabble, gifted to the delighted German strikers was a brilliant performance. Even my ten-year-old daughter could see what was wrong with our defence. These extremely rich, extremely famous young men showed no appetite whatsoever for doing what earned them the riches and fame, and most of the time stood back and let the Germans get on with it.

Scandal after scandal has shown our pampered stars to be dire husbands, but their redeeming grace was supposed to be their sporting talent. Put to the test on the greatest stage, the talent, and even the spirit were totally absent, without excuse. If this team are the symbol of our nation, what sort of nation have we become? Idle, unco-operative, afraid of challenge and full of unconvincing excuses? Or just betrayed by unworthy representatives? I do hope it is the latter, but there is this worrying little worm of doubt that England 2010 was truly and fairly reflected in its footballers.

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