Bald Truth and Bare-faced Lies

The Bald Truth Jersey, as linked in my blog list, is a witty title for the blog of my friend and erstwhile political colleague, Trevor Pitman, who has a bare scalp and a passionate commitment to calling things how he sees them.

However, he has cross-branded the title to a Facebook group, run by one Steve Southers, whom I believe to be Trevor's brother-in-law, although I may be mistaken. The Facebook group does run links to Trevor's blog, but otherwise, it has evolved its own identity, and become a very different kettle of fish.

Any Facebook group can only be as good or bad as the people who bother to join it, but the group administrators can, and usually do, shape the group to some extent, by constraining the content the members post, and controlling who is allowed in the group. I have volunteered as co-admin for a couple of the groups I am in, myself, and have been surprised at how many ethical challenges arise.

The Bald Truth Facebook group was initially populated with Trevor's Friend list, and has attracted others with an interest in Jersey affairs, until the thousand-plus membership has made it the largest Jersey discussion group, that I know of. Unfortunately, as the membership has grown, the proportion of posts from members with profoundly counter-factual worldviews has also grown. The headline posts letting us into the secret that humans were genetically engineered from apes by extra-terrestrial visitors can be enjoyed as comedy in small doses and the resident climate change denier's obtuse failure to absorb the resident environmental expert's patient debunkings also has a comedic dimension, reminiscent of the Monty Python sketch where an inept swordsman continues to bark challenges sans limbs after a comprehensive hacking.

The glimpses of an alternative reality get worse, though. There is much evidence of conspiracy theories on the page. Trevor Pitman's own political career has been hampered by a closing of ranks against him, so I can see why he would be inclined to sympathise. The tone of Steve Southers' Facebook group, however, is an anything-goes credulity towards suggestions of sinister forces secretly manipulating the world to their own benefit. (I am old enough and worldly enough to realise that great wealth does carry power, and the private and informal relationships of the very wealthy and powerful do play in counterpoint to the overt and formal structures of law and government. I am also wise enough to know that key words like Illuminati flag a need to engage extreme scepticism at least, if not ignore altogether.)

What has become the most worrying feature of the group, though, is that in spite of its links to a serving legislator, it has begun promoting the dangerously false legal advice of the Freeman On The Land movement. This is a Canadian variation of a scam that has been circulating in the USA for some years, in which dishonest legal advisors sell misinformation to to laymen on how the law is not legitimately the law of the land, and they can repudiate their obligations by declaring their independence from it. Although, they often assert that the state does have massive counter-obligations in their own favour. All untrue, of course.

Were the FOTL (Please yourself whether you read that as Freemen On The Land or Fruitloops On The Loose!) links posted as genuine discussion points, in the way most things are in topical Facebook groups, then at least the more rational members of the group could attempt to steer the more vulnerable members away from taking an unhealthy interest. Alarmingly, Southers, in spite of presenting himself as a defender of free speech when he turns up on other discussion groups is prepared to protect FOTL posts with active steps to suppress dissent. 

Note Southers' minatory response to criticism of a link to a FOTL video

The offending comments were rephrased in a way less open to misinterpretation as a slur on fellow group members.

But, it seems that the problem must have been disrespecting FOTL because Southers answered that question with a ban.

Not that that saved the piece from further attack from one of the other group admins.

So, there is one admin on the group not prepared to go along with it. Even so, it must be cause for concern that a Facebook group riding the coat tails of a current Member of The States of Jersey is actively fomenting disregard for the law, and doing so under false pretences, too. You may disregard my opinion as that of a layman, although I seem to know more real law than the FOTL gurus. You may even feel that Sam Mezec's LLB is not a sufficiently lofty qualification to impress you. Never mind, if you have a few hours to devote to some heavy and slightly repetitive reading, Chief Justice Rooke, of the Canadian Province of Alberta, has written the definitive debunking of the FOTL and all related “Organised Pseudolegal Commercial Agreements”: http://canlii.ca/en/ab/abqb/doc/2012/2012abqb571/2012abqb571.html

I don't like to write blogs without points, so this one is coming to two. The first is that despite the links to Deputy Pitman, the actual Facebook group may promise Bald Truth, but abounds in Bare-Faced Lies, and should be viewed with caution and suspicion, if at all. The second point, incidentally arising, is that FOTL and other like OPCAs are utter buncombe beneath the mock-legal phraseology, and if they seem interesting, just remember that their facts are simply untrue, and don't be tempted to act on their advice.

Clothier? Think Twice

Many of my politically interested friends are pleased to see that this week The States Of Jersey finally approved, in principle, a referendum on the revised electoral system proposed by the Clothier Commission. There is certainly a strong case for replacing the current mish-mash of accidents of history with a modern and coherently designed process. Nevertheless, despite those around me telling me how good Clothier is in theory, I have yet to see any explanation that actually convinces me it is the right way forward.

The Clothier scheme successfully addresses the equality questions that so many hold against the current complex voting system. Neither voters in their representation, nor politicians in their mandates, have any kind of equality from parish to parish and office to office. Clothier would have a single rank of members, all from similarly-sized constituencies. Job done.

However, I feel Clothier has provided the right answer to the wrong question. In general, equality is a better principle than inequality, but I disagree that it should take priority over effectiveness of representation. Before they started chipping at the current system, I had fourteen representatives, the Constable, a Deputy and twelve Senators. In the urban districts, despite their whinging about getting less than their share, the multi-Deputy districts had sixteen or seventeen representatives, including up to four of their own local ones. So, apart from uncontested elections, we all got to vote for or against over a quarter of our little parliament. That is actually pretty strong democracy, that most of the world would envy, despite the awkward structure benefiting the kind of candidates, that people who read blogs like this would not want. Now, cuts in Senators bring our shares down a little, but I can still look forward to ten votes at the next election. Even so, that is still almost a quarter, a real say in the make-up of the States.

What, in contrast would I have to look forward to on the first election day after an implementation of Clothier? Possibly, one single seat to vote on, and in my particular locality, if it were contested at all, there would still be only one potential winner. Thus, as an avid follower of politics and current affairs, I would find myself denied any significant power to contribute to the success of those I would like to see in government.

All around Jersey, others like me would find the same disengagement foisted upon them. Each district would put forward its popular local bigwig, with or without the bother of seeing off a no-hoper or two, and except in a handful of less predictable town seats, effective democracy would be wiped out. That prospect saddens and scares me.

A “Yes” vote for Clothier would certainly blast the present political establishment, but it would be a suicide bomb that takes our own hopes for better democracy with it. Don't do it!

One Moron, One Vote

I think it was Winston Churchill who pointed out that democracy was a bad system, but everything else that has been tried was even worse. I grew up indoctrinated with the orthodoxy that democracy was, on the contrary, a very good thing. However, living and learning do little to substantiate that opinion, and each passing year deepens my suspicion that the great man was right.

For small groups and trivial questions, simple majority voting is more than adequate. As the voters rise into thousands and millions, though, the scale brings practical problems to all but the most sparing use of general popular votes. Moreover, as the questions become more complex and arcane, the validity of the general lay voters' judgement necessarily declines. Thus, we have to resort to representative democracy, where the nominally empowered voters elect, according to context, a committee, council, board or parliament comprised of those who the voters trust most to study the complex questions they lack the time, if not the capacity to research, and vote appropriately on their behalf. Well, that is what they need to do to make it work, anyway.

Regular readers will have noticed a mundane tendency of this blog to pay more attention to real world outcomes than the beauty of theories. So, the reality is, many voters, especially political voters, do not ask themselves whether they trust their representatives to judge well on their behalf, but instead vote for either the most famous candidate or the one from their loyalty group, without the least attempt to assess their capabilities to make the well-informed and thought-through decisions they are unable to make for themselves.

Equality of rights is a fine and good principle, that I am proud to uphold. Even so, equality of ability is an absurd fancy, so a presumption of it is an unsound basis for anything. The compromise lies in the concept of fairness. Unfortunately, fairness is an inherently subjective matter in a way that equality is not. We all know what honestly seems fair to each of us, but our individual ideas of fairness vary and even conflict. Yet another matter where consensus is probably the best thing, for all the reflexive difficulty in fairly determining it.

One way to resolve the conflict between equal rights to vote and unequal ability to use that vote is to weight the voting, so that those likely to have better judgement count for more. I do not know why political thinkers generally shy away from considering this. The only writer I personally know to have explored it was the mid-20^th Century novelist Neville Shute.

Shute once wrote a dystopic fantasy of what Britain and the Commonwealth might have been like in the 1980s, projecting from a time of writing in the early1950s, called “In The Wet”. His premise, reflecting his personal circumstances as the proprietor of an aircraft factory under the Attlee government, was that the UK was a hotbed of creativity and engineering talent dragged down by an electoral system favouring talentless union placemen, while the entrepreneurial spirits had all baled out for colonies with go-ahead leadership, as Shute himself did in real life. In the book, the extra votes went for having a degree or equivalent, working abroad then coming back, being a clergyman, raising a family to adulthood without divorce and a few other indications of being a solid citizen. Shute's vision, rightly or wrongly, was that this would lead to a sharp increase in the quality of candidates being elected.

Sixty or more years on from when Shute flew his kite, the electoral process is a hot topic in the Bailiwick of Jersey. The current electoral districts are gerrymandered to restrict the representation of urban voters to way below pro rata, and the urban voters do their own part to justify their under-representation, by mostly abstaining from voting for the few Members they do get. Despite this manifest apathy, the minority, who do care, have long clamoured for reform.

2013 actually saw a referendum on electoral reform, but the questions were fudged to make a three-way choice between a fine reform, a botch to make matters worse, or leaving things be. Of course, people will be people and the botch narrowly won, fortunately with too small a turn-out to provide any sort of mandate for implementing it. However, one interpretation that could be put on such a result is that the democratic will of the people of Jersey is for an unequal distribution of voting power. This is where Shute's additional vote scheme comes in. With updated and locally appropriate criteria, only politicians rash enough to suggest that anyone of superior judgement would be prejudiced against them could object.

While the principle is not unreasonable, the devil would be in the detail of how the additional votes were assigned. Could we trust the States of Jersey to give the extra power to the wisest voters, or would they settle for something similar to gerrymandered boundaries, maybe one extra for a bank clerk, two for an officer, three for lawyer or accountant and none for a teacher because they are often left-wingers? I fear the latter would be the reality.

If it could be done honestly, it could be a way of improving Jersey politics, by playing on the vanity of the current establishment, to lead them to empower those who they think would support them but don't. Moreover, it would accord with the local cultural expectation, that politics should be for the middle classes. Although I would not back it myself, except as the other choice to a truly awful option, it is at least a different approach to stopping Jersey democracy from being considered an oxymoron, so I offer it as food for thought.

A Trinity For Unity?

With a year to Jersey's next election, the politically interested are once again turning their mind to the island's remarkable lack of formal political parties.

Eight years ago, the 2005 election saw a surge of interest in party politics. The Centre Party, who were actually staunchly right-wing, but just not of the Establishment, soon vanished, while the Jersey Democratic Alliance nearly settled into becoming a permanent institution, taking several years to fade away after an unsustainably vigorous start. The Establishment politicians, for their part, did not see the need to set up a formal party to promote their own side, but they made it clear that there was a considerable amount of teamwork between those who intended to be working together when elected or re-elected.

Several more years of drifting in the same direction have kept those who are content with it from wanting to be any more politically active than they were. However, those, who are are discontented with various aspects of Jersey's current government, are beginning to feel the lack of formal vehicles to express their grievances and, one day, possibly implement solutions.

To topple, or even constrain, the established clique of ethically challenged cynics will require all who are not positively with them to unite against them. Saying that much is facile, but the first challenge is in how to unite them in a manner that is both flexible enough to accommodate internal dissensions without schism, and strong enough to maintain a cohesive direction. The Jersey Democratic Alliance was initially founded with the intention to be a very broad group, hence the name of Alliance. However, the centre-right element soon found themselves uncomfortable with the dominance of more left-wing thinkers, by both work rate and intellectual power, and baled out. The centre-left element bled away more slowly over the next five years, and, since the left-wing remainder became, in effect, the Jersey Labour Party, it has done nothing, if it even continues to exist at all. If practical lessons can be learned and applied from the JDA experience, though, then it was not all in vain.

To form a party, there has to be a nucleus of people agreed on a series of policies that they either desire, or at least assent to for the sake of their colleagues' desires, and motivated to pursue them. They can then recruit the uncommittedly sympathetic as rank-and-file members, and market the policies to the relatively apolitical general public as something worth voting for, come election time. Now, it seems to me that there are more than one tenable set of policies that could be pursued, according to taste and conscience. Therefore, there should be different nuclei of supporters around the different visions. The consequence of that, in turn, is a multi-party system.

A multi-party system, though, does not in itself unite the opposition, so much as formalise its divisions. Thus, to actually achieve anything, the parties must form coalitions to implement the overlaps on their policy lists, which will probably be quite substantial. Many things that should be either done or undone remain good or bad in capitalist, social democratic and socialist societies alike, and the parties can agree to do that much together. In a simple two-party system, cross-party agreements do not happen as often as they should, as tactical gaming tends to displace political integrity, but, with four-plus parties, dirty players can just get frozen out and marginalised.

If Jersey is to succeed in achieving the degree of political health most comparable jurisdictions enjoy, we need more than a party. We need a diversity of parties, and we need formal inter-party structures in turn. I envisage something like this as the way forward:

Four to six smallish parties, perhaps representing left, centre-left, centre-right and right on the traditional socio-economic continuum, and maybe green and libertarian taking other priorities, would make the basis. Most people, who would be activists at all, could find something for them amongst that selection.

Pairs or trios of parties with substantially overlapping aims would then have coalition agreements to work together on these shared aims and co-operate electorally. Certainly there is scope and even need for such a coalition between a leftist party and any centre-left and green party that may also form, and other parties will probably want to make similar connections.

All parties would benefit from also having an association of Jersey political parties, strictly concerned with the general promotion and support of party politics, and neutral as to what its constituent parties' politics may be. This could be used to both make general recruitment drives to encourage the public to work for their political beliefs, whatever they may be, and as a lobby group, to discourage The States from further measures to restrict the formation and growth of political parties.

The detailed picture of what emerges would have to depend on how many people actually care enough about what policies. There is a threshold of 20 signatories required under Jersey Law to found a party in the first place, and, given our firmly entrenched tradition of political apathy, some of the parties that could have been might not find them.

Anyway, I see the way to mount an effective challenge to the Establishment clique as not a simple unity of opposition, but a trinity of such left-wingers as there are in Jersey in one party, non-socialist liberals like myself in another, and a formal joint project of the two parties to organise a coalition in pursuit of the two parties shared objectives.

Rebranding Anarchy

Once upon a time, when the world was much emptier of people than it is now, the few humans that did live in it formed little tribal groups. To this day, on the very margins of Earth's habitable space, a minute fraction of humanity still live in the old way, even if their traditional opportunism means saying Yes to Industrial Man's steel knives and machine-woven cotton clothes. In some places, the tribes are firmly egalitarian, to the point of lynching megalomaniacs, while others adopt an authoritarian order, so it is no longer possible to be sure what the natural order of human nature might have been: Perhaps just to do things differently from the next tribe for the sake of difference. A nomad's life in a wilderness needs no government, however, little though governments laying claim to the nomads' wildernesses may like it.

The apparent freedom of the tribal nomad may appeal to a contemporary urban wage-slave. Nevertheless, those who once lived, or still live, the life tend to find a great deal of constraint on their freedom in practice. They may contentedly accept the strict, inflexibly rule-bound social codes of tribal life as the way things ought to be, but the shadow darkening the edges of all their lives is that of food insecurity. Failure to find or catch enough to eat means immediate misery and immanent extinction, so all their lives must revolve around sourcing the next meal.

Planting crops was a massive game-changer. Suddenly, by taking possession of the land and tending it, a sufficiency and even surplus of food freed at least some of the people, some of the time, for the myriad of other activities that make civilised life so much more satisfying for those who live it. However, to make it worth the farmers' while to feed the rest, they needed reciprocal benefits, at least indirectly, such as protection and craftsman-made goods. It was more practical and reliable to actively organise this new social order than to gamble on spontaneous emergence. And so, hierarchical government evolved to fill the niche.

For thousands of years, the existence of governments has served most of their people well most of the time. Of course, there are countless examples of corrupt or incompetent governments visiting disaster upon their unfortunate citizens, instead. That may be so, but, on reflection, it is plain that the problems are with the corruption and incompetence, not the intrinsic existence of government.

Anyone who fancies themself a realist would endorse the old proverb, that you can't please all of the people all of the time. Thus, some are discontented, and some of them in turn come to believe the remedy to their grievances would be to abolish any government. Therefore, the extreme position for any rebel, egalitarian or other shade of left-winger has always been anarchy. Anarchy may sound attractive, no state to boss you around and tax your money, but pragmatists don't usually fancy the consequences of the power vacuum, unless they themselves feel equipped to become one of the robber barons filling it.

While civilisation is dependent on government, there is a very broad range of tenable opinions as to how much governments should do to deliver civilisation's benefits to their citizens. There is also an equally broad range of opinions on what the reciprocal relationship of the citizen towards the state should be. Moreover, amongst those who are much bigger on feeling than thinking, the same person's opinions on the two may not even be compatible.

Those of us, who have had the benefit of growing up in a secure and prosperous civilised country, develop a sense of entitlement to the liberties civilisation and wealth make possible. A tribal goatherd will usually accept his destiny as the way his life was always going to be, and the only thing it could be, while anyone in a position to be reading this will have their brain washed with the idea that they could have been anything they wanted to be, and, if it didn't happen, they couldn't have tried hard enough. This individualistic and self-directed view of life naturally impinges on how we feel about our reciprocal duties towards the state that nurtures us. So, often the self-made take the background for their own struggle to succeed for granted, and overlook the importance of the physical and social infrastructure that enabled them to achieve.

A worse consequence of denying the contribution of humanity in general to one's own successes, is that it leads one to correspondingly overestimate the contribution the unsuccessful make to their own misfortune. Instead of the able seeing a duty to help arrange the world so that the less able have opportunities to contribute to the satisfaction of themselves and others, the relatively successful sometimes fall into an attitude that their good fortune proves they must deserve it, and so the unfortunate must deserve to be unfortunate, too. Sure enough, some indeed do get the lives they deserve, but I would challenge the generality of the rule.

However, if you have made the error of not reckoning the common goods you built our life on, and judge others' efforts purely by what they get to show for them, you can convince yourself that not only do you never need any help, but anyone who does, cannot deserve to get it, and least of all at your expense. This then provides a moral framework to call for a descent into anarchy, so that the clever and the strong may be relieved of the duty to support the stupid and the weak as their fellow humans. This brand of anarchism is rather unattractive to people of integrity, when spelled out, so, it has become fashionable to pass it off as libertarianism, instead.

Really, libertarianism is as much a triage to spare government or society the trouble of unnecessary intervention, as it is an assertion of the right of an individual to be as free in how they choose to live, as can be accommodated by the reciprocal freedom of others. However, once you distort the morality with the idea that needing help forfeits the right to it, it simply becomes a shallow rebranding of an exceptionally vicious and degenerate variety of anarchism, for a generation raised to distrust the old tag.

Let us lay this nonsense to rest. Humankind's heritage and destiny has been and will always be to be a social animal. An occasional castaway may have to go feral, and, more commonly and dangerously, some go feral in the midst of human society, from flaws in the brain denying them the crucial part of human nature that links the individual into their group. But in the main, all of our busy life is just expansion and refinement of life in a troop of monkeys. Doing your fair share, one way or another, does not make you a victim of a confidence trick; it is not only your moral duty, but your biological purpose. It is how we function, as a species. The confidence trick is the one that tells you to abjure your humanity and go your own way with no more than a parting sneer for those you owed. The “Libertarian” anarchists pitch their corrupting manipulations shrewdly, but look through the emotive style to the harsh, inhuman, even sub-simian substance, and reject it. It would make a lesser human of you, should you swallow the bait.

I don't Like iOS7

When Apple's newest update,
By name of ios5
Came out, it was quite marvelous, 
The Apple comp'ny thrived.

And later came the next one.
 - ios6.1 
Another great achievement,
Complicated, but still fun.

But then alas, a failure,
The seventh i.o.s
It's really rather crappy,
An awful little pest.

The apps are flat,
No borders.
A part of the home screen.
It's really rather simple,
And looks too flat and clean.

I'd write complaints to apple,
But i don't like to be mean
But i must say, it's not their best
Too sci-fi and pristine.

I'm really quite offended 
By this patronising fail.
It makes me want to unupdate,
Lie on the floor and wail.

It's much more fit for babies,
Than 9-10 years plus.
I fear, dear Apple - for you
That there'll be a massive fuss.

All will be complaining,
Of these weird facilities. 
I really think that better
Could be made by chimpanzees!

Okay, i'll stop complaining.
Yes, i don't like this update
But Apple, in a pre-warning,
Make the next one really great!!!

by Libby Rotherham

Option A, In Depth

for longer than I can personally remember, Jersey has been beset by a widespread concern that the machinery of government does not function quite so well for us as we could expect, from the examples of how it functions elsewhere. Thus, we have had, in recent years, the Clothier fiasco and now the Bailhache Commission, looking to make much-needed improvements.

A decade ago, the public's leading grumble was inefficiency: All those members putting their 2d-worth into everything, slowing down the pace and sometimes even forcing the cancellation of rash schemes. However, we weren't careful enough in what we wished for. Now we have Ministerial government and the Troy Rule, concentrating power at the expense of diminishing control, and leaving a majority of Members on the back-benches, constitutionally barred from the work they actually sought to do. Meanwhile, they continue to be derided for perceived inefficiency.

The focus of concern has moved on, though, to the question of how we end up with the politicians we do, anyway. And so, we have had the Bailhache Commission. They have given us four options, none altogether satisfactory, and passed the buck back to the voting public for the next stage, although the final decision will not be ours.

The Commission have, inexplicably, demanded that any reform of electoral process be yoked to an arbitrary reduction in the size of the House. This is hugely problematical: Already, Ministers and Assistant Ministers are unable to oversee their Departments with anything like the thoroughness of the traditional Committees that they replaced. Reducing the number of Members, with a pro-rata decrease in Assistant Ministers, will only aggravate that problem. A 42 member States will soon find themselves torn between three problems. The Executive can keep power at the expense of control, as all the decisions pile up on a reduced number of desks, or they can abandon the Troy Rule, and its theoretical check on executive excess, to bring enough politicians back into government to keep the workload down, at risk of idealogical dilution, or they can urgently add a seat or even two per constituency, to make a 48 or 54 member House that can sustain a 25 or 28 member executive within the Troy Rule.

All that should not really have been part of the question, but as it has been wrongly made so, we must take it into account.

I deliberately wrote that we have been offered four options, despite there being only three on the ballot paper. There is a fair groundswell of support for “Option D”, the implicit fourth choice of abstention, whether passively by boycotting the poll, or actively by spoiling the paper. In favour of this choice, it does send the message that none of the others met people's hopes. On the other hand, it is open to being spun as a sign of indifference, and, if it is the dominant response, the States are likely to regard it as carte blanche  to please themselves.

Worse still is Option C, to positively endorse remaining with the system that is failing us. No doubt it would be a relief to sitting States Members to know that their seats will still be there, should they want re-election, but it would completely fail to deal with the inequalities of votes and mandates that discredit the States in the eyes of so many electors.

Yet even Option C looks good in comparison with Option B. The new constituencies can be considered when I look at Option A, but the glaring feature of Option B is the increased emphasis on the role of Constables in the States. I know of no other place in the world where free places in parliament are automatically given to local municipal mayors, as Constables would be described elsewhere. If we had the best government on Earth, then we would have a case for taking pride in this being part of our winning recipe. However, the starting point for the whole reform issue is that our government is conspicuously failing to measure up to its peers at present. So, what might we be doing wrong here? One of the most obvious things is clogging up a quarter of the places in the legislature with people with a primary duty to another level of administration, to the detriment of their work for both. The claimed justification that they are there specifically to represent those other levels is misguided, to say the least. Nowhere else does it, and nowhere else has a problem with local government arising from not doing it. I do not believe that there is something uniquely feeble about Jersey's parishes, that would make them wither, were they to gain their Constables' undivided attention. Option B would aggravate the problem, by reducing only the number of Members without split commitments.

A further drawback of the Constables' continuing membership of the States is, that the community standing and knowledge of the municipal administration that go to make a good Constable do not necessarily go together with the outlook on larger issues that a voter might wish for in his States representative. For example, in the UK, with its clear and unmuddled separation of tiers, it is not uncommon for the Liberal Democrats to be a town's party of choice for the local council, despite sending another party's candidate to Westminster.

Finally, my reverse tour up the ballot paper stops at Option A. As I noted above, the reduction of numbers to 42 is a mistake that will be regretted, should we choose to go down this road. However, the six-constituencies for all members elected on similar mandates is a massive improvement. I liked having 12 Senators I could vote for, but their numbers are being cut anyway, so the possibility of voting on over a quarter of the places in the States has already been lost to us. The big multi-member constituencies maintain a large fraction of the choice, though, and would improve matters by removing “rotten boroughs” that send Members, be they Deputies or Constables, to the House on so few votes that their credibility forever suffers scornful comparison with those there by the choice of thousands. These are the issues the Electoral Reform Commission was established to address, and Option A is, by and large, a remedy.

Despite the unwise cut in numbers, option A is the only one to bring us up to the expectations of a modern Western democracy, and we need to send the message to the States by going out and voting for it. We shall just have to hope then, that the States then implement the voters' choice, but exercise some discretion about the reductions, which they well might, considering the cliché about turkeys and Christmas that perennially haunts the subject.

Option A, in a nutshell

Despite the superficial fairness, the even-handed offering of retention of Constables or both Constables and Senators as alternatives could be interpreted by voters as implying that they, too, would be equally acceptable outcomes.

There are strong grounds for endorsing Option A, the six multi-Deputy constituencies without Constables. Only the first option delivers a House in which all Members are specifically elected to do the job by a comparable electorate and all voters have a fair and equal say in choosing their Members.

The second option provides only 30 Members unencumbered by the running of a parish, while the part-timers would hold equal power from fewer, and in some cases far fewer, votes; one of principal flaws of the status quo that the reform should be addressing.

Even choosing to stay with the present unsatisfactory system after all would be better than Option B, although it would be a sad waste of an opportunity to both make a real improvement and close the subject for the long term.

Full version of Blue Coupe/Stray review

Review of Opera House Gig 2/2/13 written for JEP, but published by them in an abridged form. Therefore, here is the full version for anyone who agrees Stray earned their share of the writeup:
,br /> Last Saturday, The Opera House played host to not just one, but two exceptionally fine hard rock bands. Although, sadly, the venue was half-empty, the sparse audience were delighted with their evening's entertainment.

First on were the current incarnation of 1970s heavy metal pioneers Stray. Original guitarist Del Bromham has added the front man's skills of fine tenor vocals and engaging Cockney banter over his long career, and served up his rhythmically precise and melodically fluent playing with great panache, while the younger drummer and newly-recruited bass player provided appropriately powerful accompaniment. They played both recent material and old songs from the original line-up's heyday. They are not in decline. Perhaps the strongest song of their whole set was one of the newer ones, a dark lament on the execution of shell-shocked soldiers in World War I.

By the interval, many of the audience felt they had already had their money's worth. However, more was to come. Blue Coupe swaggered on stage with the confidence befitting their backgrounds as international stars with Blue Oyster Cult and Alice Cooper, and launched into a rousing version of the latter's ”I'm Eighteen”. Blue Coupe are a slightly different recipe to their support act, in that they are more about the songs than the way they play them, but these veterans still bring their repertoire alive with the raw energy of a high-school band. The vitality of the Bouchard brothers and the charisma of bassist Dennis Dunaway guaranteed sparkling performances of many of the highlights of their respective back catalogues; BOC's thunderous “Godzilla”, haunting “Astronomy” and roof-raising “Don't Fear the Reaper”, Alice's storming “Under My Wheels” and climactic “School's Out” and many more beside.

Having brought a sizeable fraction of the audience to their feet, by the end of the main set, the band needed little pleading to return for a lengthy encore of bluesier songs, such as “Roadhouse Blues” and “Spoonful” featuring Jersey's own harmonica star Giles Robson as a guest.

All in all, it was a fine evening's music for a modest ticket price, and the many rock fans who left so many seats unbought can now give themselves a good kicking.

Tune Back Into the Rhythm of Life

I have been brought up with an awareness of, and interest in nutrition. However, the more one tries to learn, the more contradictions and paradoxes one gets faced with.

The most fundamental starting point is that not eating enough kills in weeks, and not drinking enough in days. We all have an instinctive sense of this, that keeps us alive, but that instinct can sometimes also lead us astray.

In fact, for the large fraction of the Western World that is enjoying an abundance of food in our time, the threat to health comes more from surfeit than lack. Although we mostly avoid the harm that comes from simple insufficiency of food, many people, including a lot who should know better, eat imbalanced diets that skimp on some key nutrients while overloading their metabolisms with more than they can cope with of others, and ever more of us eat imbalanced diets on such an epic scale that we break our health in the long term. The consequences of excess kill about 200 times more slowly than those of famine, but kill they do, and millions of years of potential life are going unlived as a result.

Given that we all know eating is good, and it is not transparently inconsequent logic to deduce that eating more must therefore be better, why it does not turn out that way in real life is a mystery to laymen and a challenge to scientists. The crudest measure of overeating is obesity. Being a simple thing to grasp, much money can be made from encouraging the insecure to fret about this, and there is an undeniable correlation between obesity and ill-health. However, scientific research shows that it is not a simple causal relationship: The minority of fat people, who keep their muscles fit beneath the blubber, have the same mortality rate as the lean and fit, and rather better than the merely weedy, according to the epidemiologists. Other studies have made it plain that where the fat lies is more of an indicator of problems than how much there is of it. Be it cause or, more likely, co-consequence, substantial abdominal fat goes hand-in-hand with the excessive levels of various chemicals in the blood that wreak the real damage, unseen and unfelt; whereas subcutaneous fat is a far greater menace to vanity than to health.

Chemicals in the blood, wreaking unseen and unfelt damage. There, I think, I have reached the crux of the matter; how we harm ourselves with our food without triggering any protective instincts. Only in our time have medical scientists worked out the significance of some of the many ingredients to be found in our blood, and they are still unrolling the story – below I shall come to explain how this article was sparked by learning of some current research. Everything every cell in the body needs to consume or dispose of must get into the bloodstream, but there are lower and upper limits to what is useful and harmful.

Sugars are one of the best known levels to need controlling. Without energy to live by, we are not viable organisms, but overfeeding individual cells can have dire consequences for the body as a whole. Perhaps one of the best-known of our hormones, insulin, regulates blood sugar, as one of the most important of its multiple functions, but constantly sending vast quantities of sugars from our guts to our blood can overwhelm the insulin process with at least two dire potential consequences: syndrome X, where persistently elevated insulin levels create resistance to all its metabolic effects throughout the body, with similar results to premature aging, and type 2 diabetes, where the body's ability to produce enough insulin simply burns out, with much the same effect as syndrome X and more besides, including life-threatening harm to circulation and brain function amongst other symptoms.

Cholesterol levels are another that most people know are a risk area. I myself am under doctor's advice to restrict saturated fat intake, after a couple of poor results for Low-Density Cholesterol level tests. Letting LD cholesterol get out of hand leads to the surplus precipitating out in blood vessels, until a stroke or heart attack cuts you off in your prime. An even more dismal prospect than eating less cheese and sausage!

Much more recently than the discovery of insulin, scientists have begun to investigate the role of a related hormone to insulin itself, to which they have given the distinctly uncatchy name of insulin-like growth factor 1, or IGF-1 for short. The root of this article is in a BBC2 Horizon programme, which included some coverage of research into the causes and effects of varying IGF-1 levels. It seems that adult humans metabolise digested proteins over a two day cycle, with a corresponding rise and fall in IGF-1 levels, and differing responses to rising and falling levels. In particular, according to the research featured in the programme, falling IGF-1 levels are the cue for the body's healing and immunity processes. Another question that the same programme gave some attention to was the very controversial idea of Caloric Restriction as a healthy approach to eating.

For some years I have been aware that some study has been done on comparing laboratory animals on varying degrees of restricted diet with others allowed to feed ad lib. These studies invariably achieve substantial longevity gains for the half-starved subjects. Curiously, though, humans who eat limited diets, from either poverty or spiritually motivated asceticism, do not often seem to live especially long lives. However, some of the best life expectancy statistics do come from places with a cultural tradition of eating nutritious but energy-poor staples, so there may be something in it. When reading of the latest research on Caloric Restriction, I always suspected that the likely mechanism was that reduced energy availability enforced more rest on the test creatures. However, the IGF-1 research, in which the low blood levels a day or more after a rich, high-protein high energy meal has been fully metabolised were linked to a boost in immune function and healing processes, while the high levels immediately after suppressed it, offers a realistic explanation for how animals kept permanently in the second phase could gain a benefit over those recklessly keeping themselves in the first phase.

A further mechanism I have read of even more recently, is controlled by another hormone, once again optimised by a two-day eating cycle.

The third strand to the BBC programme I was discussing, looked at some scientific research on a diet scheme called Intermittent Fasting. I must admit that I had not heard of this before. However, it struck me as one of the most important ideas I have ever encountered; a practical combination of the advice to eat well that I grew up with and all the advice to restrain and restrict my eating that I have been bombarded by ever since.

Intermittent Fasting does not seem to be as new idea to the world as it is to me personally, but it is still fairly cutting edge, with no clear mainstream. Even so, at least some of the variants are the work of serious medical scientists, rather than the “alternative” charlatans inevitably drawn to anything involving dieting. Perhaps the lack of a single plan for all to follow is part of the message; adaptation to personal requirements is better than rigid dogma.

The two front-running versions appear to be a strict alternate day regime, of eating all you have the appetite for one day, then eating a hardline calorie restrictor's 600cal the next, and a slightly more relaxed 5:2 regime of five days' eating freely, then two of CR. Since starting to draft this article, I have seen a piece in one of my wife's women's magazines by the nationally famous nutritionist Patrick Holford in which he tries to incorporate the recent interest in IF into his established Glycaemic Load based approach. Holford does not take on board the key points about cycles and low-protein days, though, which is at least a difference of opinion to the likes of Dr Mosley and Prof Longo, and probably simply missing the point of the new findings. Anyway, for what it is worth, Holford's take on it advises 800cal fast days with protein meals and maintaining even blood sugar by constant snacking. I am unconvinced, as it is uspposed to be about re-establishing the natural ebb and flow of levels, but he is the expert and I the layman,so take my doubts with a pinch of salt.(Remembering, of course, that too much salt is also a major health hazard!)

If there is no Official Version yet, though, those of us with the competence and confidence to take responsibility for our own nutrition can pick our own path. I have an active job in cold conditions and used to maintain a steady weight on about 25,000cal/wk, rather more than most of my few readers are likely to need. Thus, I have devised a personally tailored version of 1000cal and low-protein, i.e. no meat, cheese or cereal on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and all I can eat on the other days. After 20 weeks, I am a stone lighter. Moreover, I am as strong as I was, and seem to have only lost the internal body fat that made bending over a little uncomfortable in recent years, and, worse, correlates with medical problems like the aforesaid high cholesterol. Soon, I intend to go for a check-up and shall post results in a follow-up article, on how the critical blood measurements are looking now.

As well as yielding palpable physical benefit, Intermittent Fasting turns out to be psychologically much easier than literal dieting, in which the restrictions are made each and every day. On fast days, you start still satisfied from the preceding feast day, and by the end of the day, when you may be getting hungry, especially in the early weeks of the regime, you still have only to wait until morning for more feasting. Moreover, your body does acclimatise fairly rapidly. 20 weeks in, it is beginning to feel normal and natural not to eat heavily every day.

I would recommend adoption of Intermittent Fasting to most people, on the strength of what I have learned and my first-hand experimentation. However, this is about taking responsibility for optimising your own health. If you have any eating or metabolic related medical condition whatsoever, then get your doctor's expert advice on how quickly and intensively you can safely adopt IF. (If at all; it may be too late for you already, should Type 2 Diabetes have taken its grip on you.) I have done it unsupervised, as I was sure of my general good health and background knowledge , but I do not care to encourage others in different circumstances to take greater risks than there were for myself.

140,000? I Don't Believe It!

This week saw the shallowest piece of journalistic sensationalism in Jersey for years. The Jersey Evening Post ran a front page headline that the local population was officially expected to rise to 140,000. (a 45% increase on current levels, for any non-local readers) Shocking, indeed, but then a few moments of reading on makes it clear that the figure is actually a prediction of what another 70 years like the last 10 would lead to.

The shocking thing then moves from being the vast figure to the absurd incompetence of the government statisticians, who thought this worth calculating and officially reporting. The last time in history that European civilisation went 80 years without any major social, economic or climatic upheaval must have been the 13th Century. The last 60 years have been a time of especially rapid changes. However, transformative changes are essentially short term processes. Any statistics about their effects will follow either peaked curves or S curves ramping up or down to a new level. The new levels are determined by the completion of the process, though, and it is a meaningless folly, that a professional statistician ought to be above, to calculate as if a change can continue beyond its own completion.

So much for the principle. What of the substance, that I can greet the report with a sneer for its writers instead of horror at its conclusions? The first question is, of course, where would half as many people again live? This is probably the most widely cited objection to the report's validity, but actually the weakest. With a little compromising of living standards, we could at least house 140,000 mainly in existing stock, (so long as sea levels rise slowly enough to replace coastal settlements with developments on high ground) and certainly with three generations to adapt. Singletons living alone in small flats is a very recent norm, and it would not go against the grain of human nature to return to long-proven practices of grown children staying at home, or sharing with fellow bachelors or spinsters. We could easily occupy our existing housing at much higher density than we now do, and in a worsening economy, will likely find motivation to do so. Increasing the load on other infrastructure is more problematical, though. To maintain the current standard of medical care for a population unlikely to be substantially healthier, especially since the 20th Century's hard-won knowledge about nutrition is being sidelined into a subject for crackpots, will require a much larger hospital for a start. Then there is the re-engineering of the drainage system to dispose of half as much foul sewage again. Some commentators worry about the capacity of our roads to handle that kind of increase in traffic, but I think there are more global reasons why we are already most of the way through the Age of the Car, and in even 20 years time bikes and buses will have reclaimed the streets. And so for all the infrastructure; between enlargements at the upgrades that another 70 years will inevitably require, and more intensive use, we can be ready for so many people by the time we have them. If we have them, which I very much doubt.

The 140,000 prediction ignores all sorts of constraints that any realistic forecasting and contingency planning must allow for. The world of 2082 is necessarily going to differ from ours in many ways. Despite the inclination of some to disbelieve the signs as a macho exhibition of mind over matter, global warming, from the smoke we are making to live our lives as we do now, will have changed the world, and for the worse for many people, even if we cannot yet see which unlucky numbers will come up on the dice. The present baby boom of many poor third-world countries will have grown old and be dying off in another 70 years, and it is improbable that they will themselves raise enough healthy children through decades of failing harvests to maintain the exponential growth with another baby boom of their own.

The capping of global population, by inescapably finite food supply, will then break the current growth-driven model of globalised capitalism, if it has not already been politically dismantled for its social failings. Thus, any local economy that is based in the short-term on servicing contemporary global capitalism must face a very different future, be it failure or profound change, as the present just will not last for 70 more years. This is the real rub. I simply do not believe that Jersey will be able to provide livings to 140,000 people in 70 years time. It could not do so now, and it is improbable that what we euphemistically like to call the Finance Industry will be able to operate on anything like its present scale in even 20 more years.

Without work, many residents will be unable to stay, and so the population will fall. A collapsed post-Finance economy may become a cheap place to do business and attract some re-immigration, but the great boom of recent decades will not come again, and Jersey will never support a tenth of a million permanent residents.

Time and Money Well Spent?

The widespread perceptions of inappropriate self-indulgence that are attaching to Sir Philip Bailhache's “fact-finding” foreign visits have deflected attention from a more fundamental reason why these trips are a poor use of public money.

For all that Sir Philip claims to be receiving very useful briefings, his status as a visiting official must inevitably skew the picture that is presented to him to the point of uselessness as a practical guide for ourselves. It is an ancient and worldwide tradition to show only the best and most glorious when hosting high-status guests, and hide not only the rubbish, but even the mundane nitty-gritty.

Let us imagine that the Dependencies Sir Philip are “researching” decide to send reciprocal visitors to examine how our own parliamentary system is working, in due course: Who would see them and what would they tell them? No doubt there would be a dinner with the Council of Ministers and another with the Jurats, and maybe even visits to a few carefully chosen Constables, but it would be a safe bet that nobody with any track record for favouring reform would be allowed anywhere near them.

That being so, why does anybody expect VIP visits to be anything but a poor gauge of an island's political health, compared with a few hours judicious internet browsing?

Jersey needs an Independent Electoral Commission

The impending States of Jersey debate on setting up an Electoral Commission must not be dismissed as arcane self-obsession by the rest of us.

The present situation, in which abstentions consistently top the polls, cannot be claimed as a healthy or successful democracy. Thus, we need to develop a political scene that does command widespread public confidence. To do so, we need to improve the process, to offer the hope that public engagement will influence outcomes for the better. And, the hardcore under the foundations must be that we choose very carefully whom we entrust the improvement to.

While the Clothier Commission's proposals were not entirely to my personal taste, and the hatchet job the States did on them still less so, I can only admit it was a convincingly authoritative body to make those proposals. We must have another such Commission this time.

Unfortunately, some of the latest ideas being floated for the make-up of the Commission would rob it of that convincing authority from the outset. I can see a weak argument for including States Members, on the grounds that they are elected and paid to show leadership and make decisions on political matters. However, every last one of them has too much of a vested interest in the results to be at all credible. Only a completely independent Commission could be considered trustworthy. As a matter of principle, serving and prospective politicians must be ineligible to serve on it.

Moving beyond the abstract principle, any States Members tempted to vote against keeping the Electoral Commission independent has to beware of the complication that the Member keenest to get onto the Commission is the turkey who actually wants to vote for Christmas. Any Deputy faced with the risk of opening the way to a potential Chairman with a pre-existing desire to cull their numbers is going to be making their choice under the burden of a massive conflict of interest, even if the Senators and Constables can honestly follow their consciences on principle.

So, this vote will matter to us all. We must pay close attention to how our representatives vote.

A Real Party Here At Last?

Press release

A group of Jersey residents are planning to set up a Jersey branch of Lib Dems Abroad. A new States is in place. We recognise that Jersey needs policies that face up to the scale of the economic, environmental and social challenges facing the island. To help to draw up these policies, Lib Dems Abroad in Jersey can look at the work of the UK Liberal Democrat party and can consider how far they apply in a local context. We feel that their strong emphasis on local community issues alongside an outward looking international agenda fits well with the best of Jersey traditions.
While we endorse open debate and fairly placed criticism we do not collectively associate with the views of any particular Lib Dem MP or spokesperson on matters affecting Jersey.. However a grouping of people, proud of traditional Jersey values, who wish to see them continue to flourish in the best interests of all Jersey people, not just in finance, can help to promote positive new policies here.
An initial meeting has been planned for 5.30 pm on Wednesday, December 7th at Hautlieu School to form a committee and receive ideas from everyone interested in the proposal. Later there will be a vote on a constitution for the Jersey branch, using a draft provided by Lib. Dems Abroad.
We are supported by two candidates in the recent Senatorial elections, Rose Colley and Mark Forskitt, both of whom have served as Lib Dem councillors in the UK in the past.
We hope to involve both young and not so young. Maureen Lakeman, studying the International Bacclaureate at Hautlieu, has already attended two Lib Dem conferences in UK. Ed Le Quesne was a member of the SDP and then joined the Lib Dems when it first formed and through the Amos Group of Christians Together in Jersey has long taken a close interest in local affairs.
If you can’t attend the initial meeting, please register your interest by e-mailing one of us. It is not necessary to be a member of the Lib Dems to attend.
Maureen Lakeman Maureenlakeman@hotmail.com 07797 920606
Ed Le Quesne edleq@jerseymail.co.uk 730131
November 2011
____________________________________________________________

Bad Echoes From A Bad Thing

The big story where I live, in Jersey, this month, has been the horrific mass murder of a couple of Polish families on a peaceful Sunday afternoon. To inflict on anyone the fear and then agony of a knife attack is a great wrong, and to give them many extra years of empty death, when they should still have been in the fullness of life, is by far the greatest wrong of all, and even more so when stealing almost the whole life expectancy of a small child. Multiply that by six and it is enough to shock even so smug a place as Jersey.

In fact, many people are so shocked that they are blurting out quite intemperate comments. While I would hate to be misunderstood as condoning such repugnant wickedness, I feel that I cannot agree with altogether everything that is being said by some of those who share my outrage at the crime, and my sadness for the victims.

While subsequent news releases imply that the sole survivor of the incident was indeed the aggressor, there was no indication in the first few, that the wounded man had not heroically fought for his life in self-defence and won. And yet complete strangers were already pouring their hate on this potentially innocent man, without waiting to find out whether he deserved it or not. This time nobody is having to eat their words, but it might behove them to consider the age-old procedure of evidence first, judgement afterwards in future.

Another ill-considered reaction the atrocity has provoked is calls for the return of the death penalty. Two cases alone are enough show why that one is best left in the history books: Compare the horrible story of Timothy Evans, who was framed for the murder of his beloved wife, only for his landlord to be unmasked as a serial killer some time after poor Evans ended his days dangling from a gallows, with the Guildford Four, who were framed for a terrorist bombing outrage; the judge bemoaned that he could no longer sentence them to hang, but when the real culprits were caught some years later, they were released to pick up the broken threads of their lives. In both these instances, the juries were under a duty to only convict if they found the accused's guilt beyond reasonable doubt, and both times they were subsequently shown to have been wrong, but at the cost of only one innocent life. Never again, I say.

But it is not only the public who have overreacted: The States of Jersey Police Force have really gone overboard in making a large and expensive fuss. Although the consequences of a knife being used were so much more evil and horrible, the crime was essentially a simple domestic fight getting exceptionally far out of control. From a policing point of view there is no more complexity than had the killer struck with an empty hand, although, of course, that would have been a far less serious crime. They had the suspect under guard in the hospital, so what were all the closed roads and armed patrols about? Just grandstanding, and probably milking the overtime into the bargain. Visible activity, plus fomenting public insecurity has to help with getting police budget increases passed, too.

And one last grumble has to be aimed at the washed-up ex-politician who spouted off about how he thought that it was all about the terrible pressure Jersey life imposes on ordinary people. I don't buy the paper he was interviewed by, and the second-hand summaries I have seen of his opinions may not have been quite accurate, but he has had conspicuous mental health problems for some years now, and they don't seem to be getting any better. Time he discreetly withdrew to deal with his demons in private.

Neo-liberal Economics - the New Astrology

Economics is often nicknamed “the dismal science”. However, although the “dismal” part may be well earned, much of mainstream contemporary economics has a pretty tenuous claim to be science.
Unless one defines the term broadly enough to include the likes of astrology, too.

Astrologers work from a bizarre starting point. First, they take the twelve constellations that mark the ecliptic, the plane the solar system orbits in, and assert that then Sun being in front of them, as seen from Earth, magically endows people and events with characteristics relating to the items and creatures those constellations coincidentally make rather contrived join-the-dots pictures of.. Then, they even out the differences in sizes to make twelve approximately equal signs. A bit of a fudge, that. Next, for an even bigger fudge, they wind back two millennia of precession, a very slow wobbling-top type secondary rotation of the Earth's own axis of rotation, and count the Sun as being where it would have seemed to be at a given season two thousand years ago. Then, they proceed to calculate horoscopes with great care and accuracy. For all their skill and expertise, though, on top of the very deep doubts any educated and thinking person must have about how the stars and planets could influence human affairs anyway, there is that total disconnect introduced by the fudges that completely vitiates the final results. Yet many people still put a lot of faith in the astrologers' conclusions and predictions.

Neo-liberal economists seem to have a remarkably similar approach. First, they take some of the ways in which buyers and sellers could act in a market and then they assume that everyone will always follow those behaviours; it would get too complex to calculate, if they did not. Then, to distinguish each expert's theory from all the other similar ones, they take a particularly random factor to emphasise. Then they create elaborate mathematical formulae with which they can make predictions with great care and accuracy. Once again, the fudging of the input data disconnects the calculations from the deeply unconvincing mechanisms they purport to measure, and the predictions fail as often as random guesses would. And, like astrology, the soothsayers' clients are far too impressed by the care and skill put into it all to question the fundamental validity of the process.

Now, internationally, we have elected a whole generation of credulous fools into power, nearly all of whom gullibly lap up the advice churned out by the naked emperors in the right-wing think-tanks. With their fancy formulae and opaque jargon, the latter bamboozle both hapless politicians and even themselves into believing their recommendations must work out in the forecast manner. Yet, the crucial questions about how they will actually work are casually swept aside, and discreetly covered over with the blanketing assurance that free markets theistically deliver miracles of perfection, if they are only left to get on with working their magic. Of course, the markets do not deliver their miracles, except by occasional pieces of random good luck, and why should they anyway?

I would not go so far as to claim that there is no use for the study of economics, and the application to practical politics. What I would contend, though, is that there is an urgent need for a resurgence of the old Keynesian school of economics, that starts with sound analysis of what really goes on, and demands that governments actively manipulate the economy to maximise desirable activity. As I write from the perspective of a small offshore island, with external trade dwarfing internal activity, I have to concede that little of the established Keynesian theory is properly applicable locally; Keynes and his followers having concerned themselves with the workings of Great Powers with immense domestic economies. However, we would benefit from the removal or re-education of the free-marketeers currently dominating our Council of Ministers, and should stand to gain from Keynesian reflation of the UK economy we are just a little side-loop on. I had to write “should”, not “would”, as one of the measures many of the leading Keynesians campaign for is a massive clampdown on tax leakage, and rather a lot of our local economic product is effectively commission on making tax leakage happen there, which would obviously backfire on us.

Anyway, neo-liberal economists are just the latest generation of the same kind of charlatans who were court astrologers for millenia, and no more deserving attention. Do not vote for any politician who seems to believe what he reads in their runes.

Our Leader?

Hope for the Best, by All Means, but Prepare for the Worst, too.

A couple of years ago, I tried to start a discussion on cuts on another, more popular blog, to a disappointing lack of response. Here I get a good quality of comment, though, despite my small readership, so I shall revisit the topic, with a bit of copy and paste from last time, but some updates, too, and hope that we can create a really good thread between us.

Anyone with intentions to stand for Election this year should have been looking through their 2008 policies, if they had any then, and scrapping the many things that have been overtaken by events, and then shaping a new raft of policies for the 2011 elections, to carry us towards 2014.

The hard thing with looking three years and more ahead though, is that the short-term future is looking exceptionally unpredictable right now. Will our economy return to growth? Will it continue to gently decline? Will something spook the finance industry and leave our economy with bricks where the wheels were? All three possibilities are still two-figure percentage chances from where I am looking.

If it were certain that growth will return, then it would be easy to write a nice manifesto. There is probably still a need for some alternative taxation to fill the “Black Hole” that is Terry le Sueur's legacy, despite the GST hike, but with more money about, it would not need to bite too hard.
The tougher parts will be to prepare for further decline and outright crash. Many left-leaning people will probably be appalled that I even mention cuts, but if the money is not appearing in the income column of the ledger, it should not be in the expenditure column, either.

The only eager votes for a manifesto of cut this, slash that and snatch the other are going to come from the hard-right wingers I, and probably most of my readers, oppose, so we can't be shouting too loudly about intentions to do it. However, if things are still grim by the end of 2011, and the old guard are the scapegoats in the General election, then the erstwhile opposition are going to be faced with a dirty job that someone has got to do, and we really ought to have a clear idea of how we are going to go about it.

The latest figures show that States revenues are still buoyant, so there has maybe been a less pressing need for spending cuts and tax hikes than we have been led to believe. However, there is a lag of a year or two in the full effects of the recession filtering through to taxation, so it may be that something awful is about to emerge from the pipeline. And we need to be prepared to deal with it, if we aspire to replace the current government.

A fall of a few percent in revenue can largely be made up in the traditional manner, by corresponding rises in the rates of existing taxes and duties. However, these have already been jacked up faster than many people can easily adjust to in recent years, and any government doing much more of that will rapidly lose public confidence. The lost opportunity to lose the Social Security cap will have to keep on being revisited until there is a result. The diminishing progressivity of the Income Tax system is somewhat perverse, and also will have to be tackled by a new regime. I thought the way government budgets work is that they cost the activities and purchases they consider necessary to run the state in their chosen manner and then work out how much tax they need to raise. Jersey, with its love of quaintly different ways of doing things, currently goes for a different strategy of deciding how much tax to ask for, and then seeing what it buys. And, between falling profits in a global downturn and tax breaks for those rich enough not to need them very much, the tax yield is not likely to buy as much in the near future as it did in the near past. So, the C-word does have to be bandied about: CUTS!

In a diverse career, I have been an established officer in the UK Civil Service for a spell, and I get a little irritated at attacks made on a stereotype sixty years or more gone in real life. I think the popular image of the idle and arrogant man in a pinstripe suit and bowler hat leisurely making arbitrary decisions about the affairs only applies to the Bill Ogley/Mike Pollard type of senior manager, not at the levels that commonly interact with the general public. I don't think for a moment that large-scale redundancies in the public sector would do anything other than serious social and economic harm.

However, any organisation will tend to gather dead wood over a few decades, and a thorough audit, once in a generation, on the principles Leslie Chapman laid down in the 1960's, will inevitably show up a few jobs that are there because they have been done, rather than because they still need to be done. I know that the States of Jersey do already have an Audit Department that does these kind of surveys, due to a small quango that I used to be involved with receiving their attention, but they don't get the publicity they deserve.

So, the first level of cutting should be a rolling out of this thinking on a broad front. If a few percent of public sector jobs can be identified as dispensable, then their holders can be transferred to other more essential posts as they fall vacant through natural wastage, and the overall size reduced. A key factor will have to be the independence of the audit, though. If senior management are challenged to produce plans for reducing their own empires, then, humans being human, they tend to select those who would be most sorely missed as the priority for cuts, so making the plans unacceptable.

The big challenge, though, is how we would cope with a big fall in the size of Jersey's economy, say a quarter or a third? When even John Boothman, the avuncular ex-banker the finance industry often trots out to give it a human face, famously admitted that the finance industry could “leave at the click of a mouse”, there is no case for assuming it will continue to dominate our future as it has our present. There would need to be expenditure on helping the unexpectedly destitute, on top of all the usual business, so even more of the latter would have to be stopped. Law and order, and sanitation infrastructure would remain essential, and nobody would want to see medical care or education shaved too closely. But what of the rest? Opinions will be shaped by individual circumstances, but where would the consensus be found? No more roadworks, save essential utility repairs? Close the States Communication Unit, that just produces derided propaganda, and the Statistics Unit that only publishes useless and misleading “information”? Refreeze the Town Park, and halve the gardening in the existing parks? Across-the-board culls of Civil Servants? Whatever you look at, there would be more losers,than winners, but don't forget I am not asking how do we want Jersey 2014 to be, but how would we cope if the bottom had fallen out by 2013?

Depending on whether I get worthwhile feedback, I may make this the first of a little series, also taking a look at the options in less disastrous situations, and maybe following up any interesting tangents from the reader comments.

I am writing this to open a debate, not have a rant, so I beg you to consider what your idea of the “least-worst” cuts in a collapsing economy would be, and submit them by clicking the Comments option. (Tip: If you have never commented on a website before; if your answer is more than a few words, then draft in a word processor, copy and paste, because blogs don't reliably save at the first try.)

Puppets or Leaders?

Puppet or leader? Generally, most politicians are one or the other, and it is very much a matter of taste which you prefer to have in office.

By puppet, I mean that many candidates are put up by their backers to be mouthpieces for their backers' views. In the Jersey context I mostly concern myself with, that usually means cronyism amongst lawyers, accountants and those businessmen who move in the same social circles. You may have a superficial democratic choice between, for instance, the Freemason, the yachtsman and the United Club regular, but they all sing off the same sheet when it comes down to it. Once in a while, they may give a personal hobby-horse a little push, but mostly they are there to make up the numbers to vote the way the real leaders order.

A different slant on puppet politicians is that of left-wing parties and factions. In the name of expressing the will of the people, or bottom-up democracy, their politicians are expected to push the policies and cast the votes that their backers have themselves voted to instruct them to.

You may have guessed, from my choice of the pejorative term “puppet”, that, despite being an avowed democrat, and a left-winger by Jersey's skewed standards, I am none too keen on this model of representation, myself. I see two big flaws: Firstly, a matter of principle. The real decisions this type of politician implements are made by others behind them, unchosen by the public vote. This seems profoundly undemocratic to me. Secondly, the practical consequence is that the parliamentary process is completely vitiated if any significant number of members are turning up under previous orders to vote a particular way. Ben Shenton has already claimed that the debates no longer matter, because everything has been sewn up behind closed doors. The more that members are mandated by their backers, the worse this problem becomes.

Reading and listening to the news and the odd opinion piece may give us all a few shallow ideas about what is going on and what should be done. The purpose of a professional political class, though, is to read the reports and listen to the debates on behalf of those of us who haven't the time, and make better informed judgements than we can for ourselves. Asking people to read, listen, think and decide for us is a far bigger task than just asking them to do what we tell them, so we must choose who carefully to make it work. There are Members of the States of Jersey who do work in this way of course, although, unfortunately, too many of them seem to end up as backbenchers rather than ministers.

The other kind of politician is the leader. Instead of being a front for others, they recruit supporters to give backing to their principles and judgement. This can easily end in tears, as history, and even current affairs, are full of examples of unsavoury dictators finding the wrong kind of supporters to impose the wrong kind of ideas on the rest of their nation. However, it is also the only way to have a properly valid public mandate in a functional democracy. If more people have said “I trust you best to make the calls.” than did so for anyone else, then you can get on with the job without serious challenge.

The really perplexing scenario would be for the candidates with the best manifestos to be pledged to dance to party tunes and those with minds of their own all to be hellbent on paddling us further up the creek. Then it would be really hard to choose. I think I would go for the best manifesto, but I would not really have a lot of confidence in their personal ability, if they needed others in the shadows to tell them what to do.

The big problem with pre-mandated politicians is that, instead of them making their decisions on the strength of the facts in the detailed reports, and the arguments made in public parliamentary debate, their decisions are made for them by amateurs who don't have have the time to study all the facts, on the strength of news reports, gossip, prejudice and caprice, without any effective scrutiny or input by the voting public at large. This may well be commonplace reality, but it is also a failure of democratic principle, not an expression of it.

To summarise; although other ways can and do exist, the optimum model for party politics is for the parties to get behind their leaders, not to put them up as front men. Party hacks are even less desirable than chaotic independents.

Schoool Milk and Priorities

When I responded to a call to comment on the school milk fiasco last week, I was taken to task by one of Jersey's leading bloggers for not directly linking the matter to the even bigger fiasco of the mandarins' payoffs. However, I think that they are galls growing on different branches, and you have to go back nearer to the trunk to find the connection.

Free school milk was of immense nutritional value in harder and poorer times than we now live. But starving paupers have, for our era at least, been eliminated. Should you ever have cause to drive down La Motte Street on a weekday morning, and see the Income Support queue, it is striking how an overwhelming majority are conspicuously overweight. However, milk's own advantages, and drawbacks, as a food supplement do not disappear just because there is plenty else available as well or instead. Risky though a high dairy consumption may be for the middle-aged, it is the natural staple for all young and growing mammals, humans included. Therefore, it is still a good thing to make it available for children, and a better thing than most alternatives that they may wish to drink in school instead. (Except for the minority who outgrow their ability to digest milk by puberty.)

Farmers do not produce milk just out of an altruistic desire to nourish the public, of course, but to earn their own livings, and the processing and distribution are also business propositions in pursuit of profit. So “free” milk has to be paid for by somebody. Once, there was a clear case for that somebody to be the States. Now, when every family's food budget will buy rather more calories than it takes to lead an active life on, that case is no longer so clear. It would still be reasonable and practical for the state to facilitate the provision, and some level of subsidy may help to encourage takeup and stabilise supply. However, it would not be an outrageous burden on the vast majority of parents to divert a small part of their children's weekly sweet money to a milk subscription, and certainly no burden on those children's health. When we have a need to be very careful how we spend public money, 100% funding of school milk is hard to justify in the context of 2011 Jersey.

“When we have a need to be very careful how we spend public money...” I can work back towards that along another branch altogether:-

The previous rant was not enough to satisfy my anger at the ridiculous payoffs made to rid us of a couple of failed mandarins. When a man is hired to provide high level management skills in a politically sensitive environment, blundering through with respect for neither due process nor public opinion can only be viewed as gross incompetence. Gross incompetence has always been a deal-breaker in any job, and urgent departure has always been the remedy. It is ridiculous to suggest that massive inducements should be necessary to persuade the failed incumbent to pre-emptively resign. The ignominy of the alternative is generally enough. If the sky-high payments were a bribe to keep the departing staff from blowing the whistle on orders from above that made their jobs impossible to carry out competently, then they would be at least understandable, although still inexcusable. But, although there are allegations that the beneficiaries of these jackpots were involved in untoward conspiracies with certain politicians, their downfall has been very much due to their own failings in how they played their parts.

Had it been insufficient to just point out that their positions were becoming untenable, to make them step down, it should have been possible to remove them by disciplinary procedures. In fact, there is some circumstantial evidence that Ogley's departure is closely connected with the disciplining of an unidentified civil servant, the details being much too sensitive and confidential for public consumption. Unless they could produce some very embarrassing evidence in their own defence, though, it is hard to see why it would not have been better to simply remove them. It may be a bit of a fuss, and leave a bad taste in a few mouths, but it would take even more mismanagement to run up a six-figure bill on the sackings.

I would contend therefore that buying the delinquents off instead of sacking them was not so much a necessity as a luxury. Only, we have a need to be very careful how we spend public money, and this is not a careful use of it. This is a quite different matter to school milk, but it touches on the same issue: How do we prioritise the claims on the public purse? There are several aspects to consider: How good is something? How desirable? How necessary? How important? How valuable? How expensive? All the same kind of question, but not exactly the same things, and certainly not all the same answer.

Even if there are objective answers to at least some of that list of questions, others have inherently subjective answers, and weighting or ranking those answers is more subjective still, which is where the politics come in. The idea of a representative democracy is that you vote for the candidate whom you expect to make the judgements that seem most right to you. If you squander your vote by choosing on spurious grounds like having a nice glossy poster, then tough luck, if you dislike the consequences. If you are outvoted by those who think priorities should be different to you, that is tough, too. All you can do is try to persuade them that they would like your ideas better, if they tried them next time.

Anyway, to return to the examples in hand: School milk I would categorise as good, myself, but see Tom Gruchy's comment two posts back for another viewpoint. But does it score enough for necessity and importance to balance out the high score for expense? VFC says it does, I say not quite, and Phil Ozouf says not at all. Paying the ministers' right-hand men vast sums just to go away is certainly not good, desirable, important or valuable. However I can imagine circumstances where it is necessary from the viewpoint of those who can authorise such payments, not that such circumstances would be to anybody's credit; like knowing too much about cases of gross maladministration or corruption, for instance. (Imaginary and hypothetical circumstances of course.)

To sum up, both cases are matters of priorities, and priorities of democratic governments are matters of voter preferences. So, if you don't like the current incumbents' priorities, drag yourselves away from the TV for a few minutes, next election day, and vote for someone else.