Rocking Across the Generation Gap

It has been a good summer for live popular music in Jersey, and I have been keenly enjoying many of the events.

It has struck me though, as I look around all the grey heads, that the idea of rock as a youth activity is somewhat past its expiry. Indeed, teenagers do tend to have more time available for listening to and playing music than those whose lives have moved on into fuller phases, but there has been a remarkable change subtly happening, since I myself was a teen.

In the 60's and 70's rock music really was very much a youth interest, and it was rather eccentric of the tiny proportion of older fans to show enthusiasm. The music press of the day liked to reinforce the generation divide. As a reader, I used to wonder if they envied their predecessors covering the original rock'n'roll phenomenon and wanted to bestow the same historic significance on their own times.

However, a taste for classic rock and blues seems to be a one way ticket rather than a passing fad for most people. Moreover the appeal of the musical genres seems to be intrinsic, and not about generational rebellion: These days, I sometimes find myself playing the sounds of my own youth with men young enough to have been my grandkids, had I started a family sooner. To these lads, the music is not a barrier to exclude my generation, but a bridge and a shared heritage. We are just fellow rockers and grey hair counts for no more or less than blonde or red.

The point I am working toward is that rock is no longer a “youth” activity but a “people” one, and although it attracts plenty of young people the operative word is “people”, not “young”. Jersey should continue to provide maximum opportunity for its extensive resources of talent to entertain the abundant audiences of all ages, not merely as a token amusement to patronise youth with, but as general public entertainment. Let us take pride in our burgeoning music scene as one of the upsides of 21st Century Jersey: it is fun, and, moreover, a force for positive social bonding.

Spin Doctor Gibaut's Dodgy Statistics

This week has seen widespread outrage over the new Jersey pay statistics, particularly the £620 average weekly wage. Caller after caller complained on the radio that they were getting nothing like that.

This comes of using the wrong type of average for the sake of spin.

There are different ways to calculate averages to give the most meaningful value in different contexts, but they can also be misused to give a misleading value in a context where the truth could be inconvenient.

The commonest type of average, the first one most people learn about at primary school, is a “mean”. Where figures cluster around a single central value, a good approximation of that value can be made by adding the values of every datum up, and then dividing the total by their count. The trouble with processing wage statistics in this way is that earnings do not follow the “bell-curve” distribution around a medium value that means are designed for. Instead, they have a “power-law” distribution in which relatively low figures are commonplace and ever higher figures become ever rarer. The meaningful average for a power law distribution is the “median” in which just as many data have a higher value as a lower one.

Now if you were a cynically dishonest government wishing to tell the world how prosperous your policies were making your people, you could instead calculate the mean wage and pass that off as the average. But it would not be: The tiny number of very large figures would distort and inflate the mean to well above any sensible concept of the average. Wouldn't it make the government look good? See how rich even the ordinary workers are, with the economy in their safe hands!

However, there is a serious downside to the puffing up of the statistics: By making all the people who are actually doing all right think that they are a lot further behind than they really are, the misapplied average spreads discontentment and unhappiness. Worse still, from an economic management viewpoint, it creates an aspiration amongst genuine medium earners to seek hefty pay increases to restore their apparent position, an inflationary pressure that we could well have done without, in these troubled times.

Worse still, the politicians who commission these inflated figures may use them to justify regressive taxation measures, and to excuse failures to remedy the excessive costs of certain things in Jersey, such as housing and public transport.

The Statistics Unit appear to see themselves as spin-doctors to the Council of Ministers, rather than information providers to the island as a whole. They are letting us all down by this approach. I for one would like to see a change of heart, and the provision of useful and helpful information to become their new objective.

Admit it! We can't afford excellent buildings

Freddie Cohen confuses me. He talks the talk about wanting architectural excellence for Jersey, but, when it comes down to it, he both approves glass and concrete monstrosities for landmark sites and turns down the chance to get a Quinlan Terry neo-classical masterpiece on another one.

To be honest, Jersey does not have a very deep tradition of fine architecture to draw on, anyway. Victoria College, St Thomas’s Church, a few 1,1,(k) mansions and that is about it. I am not saying that there is not a good deal of historical interest in our other principal buildings, but they lack the combination of artistic magnificence and engineering excellence that makes great architecture great.

Walking around central London on holiday last week, I was able to look up and around at the splendour of so many of the buildings there, and appreciate it in a way I could never spare the attention to, when I used to drive around there years ago. In particular, many of the big Nineteenth Century buildings make the more recent stuff rising around them look somewhat shoddy.

Of course, 19th Century building styles reflected both a wealth that is now sadly behind us, and a degree of social inequality that is sadly threatening to creep back. The packed rows of cramped two-up-two-down terraced cottages in London’s back streets are no better than those in St Helier, and for the same reason; they were built to rent to the people who did not matter. However, when it came to building for the collective public, rather than its individual members, a different ethos used to prevail. The Natural History Museum, The Houses of Parliament, The War Office, even the main theatres have a harmonious fractal quality of well proportioned structures composed of neat and pleasing sub-units down to fine detailing. These are deliberately impressive structures glorying in the abilities to both afford and build them, and successfully meant to serve the following generations for centuries to come. Even the old County Hall, from the lean years following the First Wold War, was built both sturdily and with a visual presence. Although it has outlived its original purpose, the excellence of its structure continues to provide premises to a variety of tourist enterprises; hotels, exhibitions, shows and restaurants.

In the bankrupt turmoil of the Twenty-first Century, the labour-intensive beauty of Gothic architecture is an indefensible extravagance for public buildings. With money tight, down-to-a-price has to be the general principle, not up-to-a-standard, although, for buildings whose purpose is likely to endure for centuries, such as schools, it may be a false economy not to build similarly enduring structures, using proven classic techniques and materials.

If excellence cannot be on the menu, however, perhaps we should have no empty boasting about the supposed quality of our built environment. A sober admission, that times are hard and this is all that we can have, would be more appropriate.

Back with a Plug

I have been taking a few days away from Jersey for a family break in London. Although my wife and I have both spent enough time there to get sick of the place in bygone years, our children had never seen it. We all found that a few days taking a tourist’s eye view of the place was very agreeable indeed. I also found that coming back from a few days in radically different surroundings has given me a fresh perspective on my usual ones, which I can mine for blog material.

Firstly, though, a recommendation: If you want a comfortable, friendly hotel in easy reach of all the major attractions, the Premier Inn in the North-East corner of the old County Hall delivers on its promises of a good night’s sleep and a good breakfast, and moreover is better than some at putting staff with personal charm into customer contact roles.

Hollow Celebrations Part 2

May 9th looms, and the Channel Islands prepare to celebrate Liberation Day, the anniversary of the capitulation of the German occupiers in 1945.

Unfortunately, although the Third Reich's claim to the territory may be sixty-four years lapsed, an alarming amount of their spirit seems to linger in the way the States of Jersey exercise their restored autonomy. The Occupation may be long over, but Jersey can hardly claim to be liberated. Freedoms that mainland Britain takes for granted are grudgingly controlled by authoritarian bureaucrats or parish officials.

Our planning department has shockingly intrusive powers to interfere in how citizens use their private space, and yet permit an endless series of massive eyesores to be built in prime locations, so long as it is by or for a big and well-connected business.

A peaceful outdoor music event will be policed even more heavily than an angry political demonstration, and the promoters forced to pay the overtime for all the surplus officers. In fact, in an echo of the old Lord Chamberlain of England, all public entertainments are obliged to seek permission from the Bailiff, whether policed or not. It has become legal to dance on a Sunday in recent years, but you must not be caught doing it any day to a pub band.

A very recent case chillingly revealed that the Police no longer need search warrants, but, if they follow the prescribed procedure, may thoroughly ransack a private family home like a gang of burglars, on the pretext that one of its residents is suspected of a minor offence.

And then there is the way that ranks close around anyone suspected of abusing authority. Elsewhere, conspiracy theorists usually seem away with the fairies, but here they tend to be serious people with thick files of evidence for their allegations. But will those with the ultimate power defend their credibility by investigating and, if found appropriate, casting out those who shame them? Not while the current shower are in charge, that is for certain.

By all means, let us rejoice in VE Day. It was one of the greatest moments of my parents' generation's lives, and of immense historical importance to what kind of world I grew up in. But, things need to change a lot to make it worthy of calling “Liberation Day”.

We had Chiglet for tea!

I have occasionally grumbled before about the vagaries of food labelling laws, both here and elsewhere on the web. The other day I got caught out, myself.

We did not do a Sunday Roast this week, for various reasons, so I bought a packet of roast chicken breast from the corner shop instead. I do not wear my reading glasses for shopping, or at least I have not until now, but I think I need to start.

The meat was produced by a very famous East Anglian poultry farmer, which maybe should have put me on my guard, as he has a reputation for including some low-quality products in his range. However, it said 100% chicken breast on the front of the packet, and so I bought it.

Later, my daughters and I sat down to eat it. Their comments were not only amusing, but reveal just how impressive the product quality was. “Is this chicken or ham?” asked the 9-year-old. “Did a chicken marry a pig and make chickpigs?” enquired the 5-year-old. “You mean chiglets!” big sister responded. For my own part, I found it surprisingly briny, so I put on my specs and got the packet back out of the fridge.

“MADE FROM 100% Chicken breast” was what the front really said, only I didn't notice the 5-point type in light blue with my naked eyes. Even so, the percentage is both meaningless and misleading, if it refers to how much of an ingredient was itself, rather than how much of the product is that ingredient. I am sure their lawyers have made sure that the label is legal, though. Anyway, I turned the packet over and looked at the details on the back. These contradicted the front, but very much confirmed the eating experience. Really it was only 80% chicken, and reformed chicken (food industry euphemism for sausagemeat) at that. The rest was water, salt and miscellaneous gunk that one would not dream of putting into a home-roasted bird. So the info on the back was honest enough to satisfy the law, but the front packaging was nevertheless misleading enough to get a sale to a customer who would not have been interested, had he known what it really was.

It is no use compelling suppliers to put accurate product information on the backs of packets, if they still have licence to mislead you on the front. As I have said before, we need higher standards of food labelling enshrined in law.

Hollow celebrations - Part 1

As an ethnic Englishman, I get told every year by the media that I should be filling with patriotic pride at the advent of St George's Day.

Apparently, I should take it as a great honour to my people, that the Roman priests of a Jewish prophet assigned us a Greek saint, from what is now Turkey, to share with Portugal, Russia, Greece and a few other countries as our patron saint.

Well, I think that is a gross insult to our nation, not an honour. These halfwits who campaign for it to be a secular National Holiday are swallowing the insult whole. Apart from generally disapproving of the entire concept of patron saints anyway, I really cannot see the point of claiming a special relationship with one who had absolutely nothing to do with us in his lifetime. As the lead missionary in the conversion of Ireland to Christianity, St Patrick had massive and lasting historical significance in making Ireland what it is, and it is not inappropriate for the Irish to remember him when they celebrate their Irishness or vice versa. But which saint ever did much of note in England? St Thomas Becket was too much of a mover and shaker for his own good, and that is about it. If we must have a patron saint, let us celebrate him, instead.

Breathing Space, That's All

Breathing Space
The welcome news, that Jersey has made the G20 whitelist of tax jurisdictions, means that we shall not be losing our “finance” industry just yet. The fear is, though, that there will be a complacent declaration of “business as usual” from our ministers.

The white, grey and black lists were only the first stage in the backlash against tax havens, that their own success has provoked. The longer-term strategy for the G20 is to abolish large scale tax avoidance and havens altogether. Therefore, Jersey's long-term strategy must likewise be to wean itself off the wonderful boost that the finance industry has been giving our economy in recent decades, and return to self-generated wealth as the mainstay of the economy. Our place on the whitelist should buy us a little time to start preparing for a post-finance economy, while the money is still pouring in. But, it is only a breathing space, not a viable future. Nobody really wants to hear that, not the cynical right-wingers enjoying the ride on their gravy train, nor the envious left-wingers hoping to redistribute the gravy train's cargo, nor those of us who like to think we are just ordinary “Middle Jersey” making a living whatever way comes to hand. Not wanting to hear is not at all the same as not needing to know, however, and we should all start thinking about our personal contingency plans, faced with the catastrophic economic effects of 25% unemployment and no dole.

Worse still, the time frame is already looking an order of magnitude narrower than it did, when I started planning this article last week. Gordon Brown has now sent the heads of the Crown Dependencies' governments a curtly menacing warning that they will be expected set the pace in developing tax transparency, and meeting new international standards regarding tax avoidance as they are rolled out. (You can view it yourself at http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Brown_090408_Letter_to_jersey.pdf )

We have not been told to close the finance industry down in so many words. The huge problem for us will be that, if we are compelled to lock into a much less leaky international tax system than there has been since the mid-20th Century, the Unique Selling Proposition for much of our finance industry's traffic will be vitiated. The industry has already declared the depth of its commitment to Jersey in the wonderful soundbite “We can leave at the click of a mouse!”, so only a fool would hope for them to stay around as a favour to us.

From the finance industry's own perspective, we are not looking as good a deal as we did, until the 2008 Credit Crunch. Now the whole sector is in deep trouble worldwide. On top of that, many major players are now being propped up by the very taxes that their offshore operations try to cheat, leading to unprecedented pressure to reprioritise their duties to state and shareholder. And then the profitability of those offshore branches and subsidiaries is going to be driven downwards, by the elimination of substantial chunks of their custom. What will be in it for them, to keep Jersey alive as a financial centre on any grander scale than it was half a century ago?

Attempting to cling to “Business as Usual” as a motto will only bring disaster, as half the income and a quarter of the employment rapidly vanish, and the loss of all that spending power then drags local commerce into the pit after it. While all the ways that Jersey leaks money back out dry up more slowly, further starving us of cash, or even simply starving us.

The buzzwords of Jersey politics in the next couple of years must become “Exit Strategy” and “Contingency Plan”. If our ministers do not have them, and good ones, too, or those that have them do not become our ministers we are doomed to drop into the Third World with a very painful bump.

GST - let's not make it even worse.

I am one of the many who saw the introduction of a Goods and Services Tax, rolled up into retail prices like a Value added Tax, as an unsatisfactory answer to the consequences of the Zero-ten scheme for Jersey's corporate taxation.

On the other hand, I am not so convinced that, now we are stuck with it, that copying the mainland UK pattern of complex exemptions for all kinds of favoured items will not just make it even worse.

The level of the tax is driven by the need to raise a set amount of revenue from Jersey's ordinary households, spread evenly or fairly. Even and fair are seldom synonymous – the less resources one has, the less fair an even share of the burden feels, while conversely, those who can support more than others tend to see being obliged to do so as an injustice against them. But, one way or another, the taxmen will have calculated the average amount that they need to raise from each of us. As they need to take that tax, it makes little difference to the bottom line whether they take a little for all that we buy, or bigger chunks for just some of it. Possibly the latter opens a theoretical opportunity to avoid GST altogether, by a very austere lifestyle with not even the slightest luxury, but in practice the losses will have to be recouped by piling all the more tax on the items that remain within the net. And, not just to compensate for the loss of tax on the “basics”, but even more to cover for the depressed demand for more expensive luxuries. So, the standard of living for pensioners and others on very low incomes will not be appreciably better. It makes no odds whether one has no beer or ciggie money left after buying taxed food or just not enough to pay the new prices after buying untaxed food.

What the UK model does bring, though is unwelcome confusion and unfairness. A notorious bone of contention is trying to define the nebulous boundary between untaxed food and taxed confectionery, but in general arbitrary definitions and limits for anything are a raw deal for those whose products are stranded just on the wrong side. Do we really need to hire a couple of civil servants to pick through the UK precedents and choose which ones Jersey should follow, and which it should not, for the sake of keeping Jersey different? The latter is clearly a big issue with GST, or else they could have enabled everyone to get off-the-shelf VAT systems by adopting it lock, stock and barrel in the first place.

Keeping GST broad and light does make us all taxpayers, maybe no bad thing in this age of low levels of civic engagement, but it also means only those of the most extravagant habits need pay much. The fewer exemptions there are, the fewer injustices are generated by them. For instance, I do not see why fuel for luxury motor cruisers is less deserving of taxation than the fuel for the car I commute to work in. The more such exemptions GST becomes peppered with, the more it will become unfair.

Doubtful Thinking

In Jersey, as in many other places, a jury may only choose from two possible verdicts, or else invalidate the whole proceedings by refusing to agree any verdict at all.

It is very wise to keep the standard of proof for punishment at guilt beyond all reasonable doubt. The problem is that, at least as the trials are reported, sometimes what is actually established is that the accused is not innocent beyond all reasonable doubt. In Scotland, they have a third verdict for such cases – not proven. The flaw in the Scottish option is that it is a full and unconditional acquittal, not a starting point for a retrial. However, given the options of maybe punishing a victim of a false accusation, or maybe letting a heinous criminal get away with it, one gets the impression that in the privacy of the jury room they occasionally perceive a moral duty to make sure the case sticks to the accused to take precedence over their legal duty to eliminate doubt.

To my untrained layman's mind, it seems that it would be a boon to jurors, if they could bring a not proven verdict, where neither has the prosecution proved their case beyond doubt, nor has the defence convincingly asserted the accused's innocence, but for that not proven verdict to permit the possibility of a retrial, and maybe for the proceedings of the original trial to be admissible evidence at the retrial. This would enable the jury to take a constructive step towards a final resolution of the case, without feeling obliged to make a decision that the evidence that they have heard does not altogether support.

Do I have any lawyers or law graduates amongst my readers? If so, do you think that this is a good idea, something that could be developed into a good idea with expert assistance or just proof beyond all reasonable doubt that laymen should leave law to lawyers?

Served fresh - Come and get it!

So far, I have mainly kept to serious matters in this blog, apart from one rejected JEP letter about the Amaizin Maize fun park. However, I am a man with a broad range of interests, including some fun and frivolity.

Before I became too busy with important grown-up stuff, like family and politics, I was a keen rock musician, living for the buzz of performing – even if it was much more often solo busking than the big thrill of gigging with a band. When I turned fifty, I decided that I was old enough to have a mid-life crisis if I wanted one, so I treated myself to a nice Les Paul guitar and advertised for musicians to form a band. Sadly, it fizzled out after a tantalising handful of rehearsals, so I was back to churning out rough multitracks for the internet. (I told you back in post #1 that I do quite enough self-promotion elsewhere on the web, without putting my name all over this blog, too.) Deep in my heart, a little pilot light still burns, though.

At the end of last year, I started noticing references to jam sessions at St Helier's “Tipsy Toad – Town House” pub every Tuesday. Between being busy one way or another, and also being a bit shaken in confidence, after recently failing an audition that I thought had gone well, it took me a while to get round to going, but this week I took the opportunity of my family being away to go down. I enjoyed the evening very much, and got the chance to play a few songs myself. I found playing guitar with good musicians a little more worrying than I used to, but I got away with it, and at least the singing felt as if I had never had a break from it. (I wish I could sing like that at home, without the psychological boost of a band behind me.)

Bully for me, I suppose you are thinking, but regular readers should have noticed that my blog articles always have point and purpose. And it is this: There were just about enough people to make it worth it, but not really as many as there must be out there, who would enjoy coming. If you like live rock and blues music, either as a performer yourself or a keen listener, come and secure the future of the sessions by your support. It is far from all being the likes of me: The core is the O'Keeffe brothers from Killian and Suzy's Field, along with other Real Musicians such as The Dirty Aces and Kevin Pallot and Paul Bisson making appearances on my first visit. Definitely a good night out, if you are in Jersey and like that sort of thing. See you there!

The Rubbish Incinerator Again

(This was written for the letters column of the JEP, really, and it goes back over some ground I covered in the blog last year. However, as my next letter, on a different subject, has already appeared, I don't think this will get used now. So as there is some new content, too, I shall put it on here, instead.)

We shall never achieve a world in which mistakes never happen, so we must seize our opportunities to put those that we make right, where we can. Thus, I am very glad to see Deputy Wimberley bringing a proposition that the States undo their blunder with the la Collette incinerator.

The first question to which there has been no satisfactory answer, is why will the planned la Collette cathedral of garbage be so huge? Just across the sea, at Taden in Brittany, they are successfully operating a 90, 000 tonne per year incinerator. To deal with the waste from a catchment of 250,000 people! What are the Council of Ministers intending to grow Jersey's population to during the life of this plant? Bellozanne may be too old and too crude, but, since the third stream was added, it has not faced the problem of being too small. Running the new one way under capacity means either stop/start, or constant underloading, neither of which will produce the clean, hot burn needed for good results. If incineration remains the way forward, let it be on the right scale, at least.

Of course, it is very doubtful whether mass incineration is still the optimum strategy for disposing of tens of thousands of tonnes of mixed waste per annum. Even with the world slump reducing demand and prices for materials in general, most things can be recycled more economically than they were originally created. There is a range of modular systems available that sort and clean, or clean and sort the recyclables, and power it all by processing the burnables into high efficiency fuel, either gas or solid pellets. And these systems fit into normal prefab industrial sheds, too. Best of all, they are around a quarter of the price of mass incinerators.

Which leads to the greatest defect of the la Collette project by far: The immense capital costs, of both the plant itself and the remodelling of the neighbourhood to accommodate it, wipe out any possibility of the economics making sense. About a year ago, I had an interesting and informative discussion with an industry insider. He quoted TTS's own reckoning that municipal waste was costing around £55/tonne to handle at 2007 prices. He also asserted to me that the whole waste operation could be privatised to an operator using a modular clean, sort and pyrolyse process for a charge of as little as £40/tonne, with the private operator making the rest of their money on the recycling. He then drew my attention to the financial implications of what was then expected to be an £80m cost. Updating that figure only makes the picture worse:

The headline cost of the main plant is now £106m, only, since it will be paid in Euros, and the exchange rate is likely to stay crashed for years to come, it will probably work out to something like £140m, or more. On top of that, there is the massive amount of civil engineering envisaged to make la Collette even suitable for the plant. At least another £100m, and maybe a lot more. Let us be optimistic and say £240m altogether. Still being optimistic, let us assume that the new incinerator will last 30 years. That equates to £8m/year. Then suppose all recycling targets fail badly, and we have 80,000 tonnes/year of waste to burn. That would make an effective cost of £100/tonne on top of the £55/tonne handling cost, totalling £155/tonne, against the £40/tonne modular plant operation.

If recycling initiatives do work here as they do elsewhere, the waste volume could easily fall to 40,000 tonnes/year of course, for a more realistic cost of £255/tonne of waste processed. All in all, about six times as expensive to use last century's technology as today's.

Fortunately, the Ministers most personally committed to the la Collette fiasco have now left office. The new House can therefore take the credit for putting a stop to it without losing face themselves. I hope for all of our sakes that they do so.

A Wake-up Call

The biggest news in Jersey recently has to be the controversial closure of our much-loved Woolworth's store. Due to the lack of the competitors in the same lines of merchandise locally, our own branch had not suffered the slumping sales of the mainland chain, but was just dragged down by them. That much is simple real-life economics, but the fate of the staff has darker aspects.

Firstly, it appears that the liquidators have wilfully flouted Jersey employment law, by dismissing the workforce with neither notice nor payment in lieu. Perhaps, as English accountants winding up an English firm, they feel that they are beyond the reach of Jersey's courts, and may even be right to think so. This is at least a cruel moral injustice, and probably a statutory crime, and any steps, that can be taken to enforce the law and punish its breach, should be vigorously pursued by our authorities.

On the other hand, though, the said liquidators have sheltered behind the letter of the local law, to exclude Jersey staff from the redundancy payments that have been made to those losing their jobs on the mainland. Obviously, this is technically not a crime. It is, however, another cruel moral injustice that reflects only shame and disgrace on its perpetrators.

In the face of forceful lobbying by various interested or sympathetic parties, our local parliament, The States, have considered the matter. Typically, they shelved it in a vote neatly split into the pseudo-party of right-wing “independents” who have long held power, and the slightly smaller pseudo-party of less cynical others, including the one real party operating in our impoverished democracy. The vote at least puts in black and white who is who in the newly elected house. Those of us who do not love the “establishment” can see that we need to pick out five or six of their people, who might be open to persuasion, to shift the balance of power. Looking at the names, though, that will be much harder to actually do than it is to prescribe.
In the immediate future, the other lesson, to learn from this unhappy scandal ,is that Jersey needs to introduce redundancy laws equal to the rest of the English-speaking world as a matter of urgency. It may be possible, if politically difficult, to make some kind of one-off provision for the Woolworth's people. The real need, though, is to get satisfactory arrangements in place before the financial tsunami of the global downturn has swept away many more jobs. There is serious work for our politicians to do here.

So near, yet so far

From the top of the lane, where I live, I can look across to the island of Sark, separated from Jersey by only a few miles of shallow sea, and yet, if one has the pleasure of visiting it, a world away in almost everything but climate and language. Jersey is a busy, impatient place, full of people frantically overworking to finance their conspicuous consumption, and losers in the rat-race comforting their disappointment with alcohol or heroin. Sark is a quiet, carless oasis of tranquility, whose inhabitants cherish their cosy peace.

The extent of the differences from Jersey has been highlighted this week, by the General Election that was held there. The General Election itself was the first contrast. In Jersey it is felt that the public could not be trusted with the power to thoroughly remove an unsatisfactory regime, and the system is designed to allow only piecemeal change. This year, as always, the inability to make any big change discouraged the overwhelming majority of entitled electors from bothering to vote. Sark, though had never had a public vote before, and the turnout was a huge proportion of its tiny population.

The second striking contrast between Sark and Jersey, is that in Sark, the supporters of democratic reform, who brought about the General Election, were also looking in the longer term to selling the island out to rampant commercialism, whereas Sark's establishment wished to retain the quaint and quiet lifestyle that made it such a delight to visit or inhabit. In Jersey, it is the democrats who are sick and tired of being sold down the river, and the establishment who rub their hands joyfully at the prospect of massive development to accommodate soaring immigration. The calculation by the establishment in both islands, that the general public are deeply sceptical of the benefits of living in a highly developed island, leads to different strategies. When Sark reluctantly bowed to mainland pressure to institute full democracy, the old guard stood on a platform of defending Sark as it has been, and were endorsed by their newly enfranchised voters. In Jersey, the establishment got back in by murky spin and shrewd avoidance of vote-splitting, and by the grace of a badly or cunningly designed electoral process most qualified by a minority of the votes cast by a minority of voters. The losers, of course, got even smaller minorities, so they cannot complain too much, but being elected in polls topped by abstentions is not much of a mandate. Not that they have to care about mandates – they are in office for the next three years and can do as they please.

A third contrast is the different attitudes of the electorates to blackmail. In Jersey's 2005 elections, much was made of a quote from a leading representative of the mighty finance industry, that it would leave at the click of a mouse if its puppets were not re-elected, wiping out a quarter of Jersey's jobs instantly, and many more in the knock-ons. So, the few who voted decided that readiness to instantly leave if it could not pull strings was a sufficient level of commitment, and backed the finance industry's men. (Note to non-Jersey readers – finance industry is a local euphemism) In Sark's 2008 election, the Barclay brothers, who had bought up a quarter of Sark's employers while promoting democracy as an avenue to their own seizure of power, likewise let it be known that they would be off, if their stooges did not win. They were comprehensively beaten, to their fury.

A hard decision is, what lesson should be learned from looking at these contrasts? Jersey long ago sold its soul, and is proudly open for business, red light shamelessly shining. Sark has refused to be bought, and can hold its head high. Yet, one cannot live and raise families on pride alone. Sark is suddenly a disaster zone, even as Jersey wallows in its customary orgy of materialism, "Christ"mas. If Jersey were to lose its finance industry, whether through our own intransigence in the face of blackmail, or, more likely, through changes elsewhere turning the money supply off at the mains, we too could be where Sark is now, and by and large, less able to cope. Is the moral, if blackmailed, give in. Or is it, if blackmailed, hold out and be damned. I favour a third option; don't let anyone get into a position of more power over you than they can be trusted with. Jersey needs some rebalancing of the economy to achieve this though. At present we are right under the thumb.

Tantrum of the Century

There have been strange goings-on in Sark. (For any random readers not from the Channel Islands, a small and beautiful island a few miles North-West of Jersey, with quaintly old-fashioned ways. Readers who found this blog through local links can skip the first three paragraphs.)

For centuries they have proudly clung to a semi-feudal local government, in which only the 40 principal landowners were eligible to vote. In the late 20th Century a pair of Scottish newspaper magnates, the Barclay twins, bought an islet just off Sark's coast, and within its jurisdiction, and built a magnificent palace for themselves upon it. However, their islet did not come with a seat in the local parliament, [correction: only one seat]so denying them the power that their wealth would have bought them in most tax havens. The magnates did not get so rich by being quitters, though, and they mounted a campaign to push the mainland government into forcing reform in Sark.

So, at long last, the first fully democratic election has been held. The contrasts with neighbouring Jersey are enough to be another article in their own right( coming soon). In the expectation of taking power in due course, the Barclays bought up many local businesses and properties, with a view to transforming the island into a hive of intensive commercialism. In the run-up to the election they let it be known that their continued commitment depended on votes for their puppets. Or blackmail, in plain English. The Sercquois, however, saw sacrificing all that currently makes Sark a lovely place to live or visit, to be ruled by a bunch of blackmailers, as a double whammy, and a massive majority of the tiny population backed the old guard instead.

And so, the true colours of those stalwart defenders of democracy, the Barclay brothers, were finally unfurled. No gracious congratulations to the victors. No reflections on their failure to convince the voters this time, nor vows to present a stronger case next time. Instead, in an enormous [in both the modern and archaic senses] tantrum, these petulant senile delinquents instantly closed all their investments on the island, thus throwing a quarter of the population out of work.

One can hardly deny the right of a businessman to close an unsatisfactory enterprise at any time and for any reason: Even if one tried to make it illegal to do so for an unapproved reason, an appearance of legitimate grounds could always be contrived with suitable economies of truth. The closure of a quarter of Sark at this time and for this reason, though, reflects nothing but shame and disgrace upon these wicked old men.

In contrast, the brave decision of the Sercquois, not to sell their communal soul, even in the face of serious blackmail, is admirably heroic. Here are people who value the exceptionally high quality life that they enjoy, and would not sacrifice it for mere greed. That the Barclays see fit to destroy them, because they could not buy them, is an immense moral crime, despite the impossibility of making it a legal one.

I hope that strenuous efforts to assist the Sercquois are made by the still-prosperous islands around them. The Barclays, though deserve nothing but ostracism from decent society. Let them fly back to their palace in the sea with their tails between their legs, and rot there forever.
( I shall follow this piece up with another on the comparisons with Jersey)

Your Home may be at Risk, if Someone Else...!

This week, there was an interesting thread on BBC Radio2's Jeremy Vine Show, about banks evicting paid-up tenants for defaults by their landlords. The initial story was on an American sheriff in Chicago, who was responsible for carrying out forcible evictions under local law. After a few cases of having to put paid-up, law abiding tenants out on the streets, to have their chattels stolen by passers-by, the sheriff had consulted his conscience and refused to enforce any further such eviction orders. This tale elicited audience responses recounting the same thing going on in Britain.

It is quite reasonable, that if a landlord defaults on the mortgage of a rental property, their lender should be able to recoup their losses by taking over, and disposing of the property. However, if a lender has funded a buy-to-let, then the intention was for it to be tenanted, and a third party's home. Therefore, if the lender should find itself needing to repossess the property, it should be repossessed as a tenanted home. The lender has no conceivable moral right to take the property with vacant possession instead, and it is deeply disappointing to learn that the present state of the law allows a court to give them a legal right to do this. It inflicts groundless hardship on an innocent party to give the lender something which was never intended to be available.

In these troubled times, when repossessions may be expected to rise, there is an urgent case for governments to act to forbid this practice, wherever there is a defective law permitting it.

Accidents happen, but some could be avoided.

This week in Jersey, a newly qualified driver's first experience of the rain-sodden leaves, so typical of country roads in autumn, was a spectacular crash. Fortunately she and her passenger, who had recently also survived a similar incident, walked away with trivial injuries; a vindication of the modern cage-and-crumple-zone school of car design. One wonders if the requirements of contemporary driving tests are quite meeting the needs of the general public, or whether they are encouraging instructors to teach a narrower range of skills and knowledge, than their pupils will need, when they become everyday road users. The Compulsory Basic Training inflicted on learner motorcyclists these days may be tiresome and expensive, but one does not seem to read of accidents to young bikers so often as one used to. Perhaps it should form a model for the future of car tuition, in which key skills for coping with difficulties could be taught without the overload of learning general traffic techniques at the same time.

Possibly, we should rethink our whole approach to a variety of traffic offences from scratch: Speeding has become a team sport with motorists on one side and the police on the other, and sometimes the point of why one should not go too fast gets a bit lost.A radical thought I have, and it is so against contemporary culture that the kite needs to be flown for a long time, before anyone seriously tried to implement it, is that all speed limits should be abolished. Instead the responsibility should be placed firmly on the driver to match their speed to the circumstances. If drivers faced a mandatory ban on a similar tariff to drink-driving for contributing to an accident by inappropriate speed for the conditions, then a lot of people who now just glance at the speedo and think that they are alright, because they are legal, might think a little harder as to whether they are actually driving safely. In good conditions, of clear roads, long sightlines and firm grip, traffic could move somewhat more briskly than it does, but anything that persuaded drivers to be more wary of other traffic, especially pedestrian, blind bends and slippery patches would surely be a good thing.

New Broom Sweeps Clean. Or Maybe just under the mat?

it is a great relief to learn that the possibility has been eliminated, of the remains found under Haut de la Garenne being the result of foul play in our own time. If it has been eliminated, and not just denied, that is.

However, the reporting so far has left a few matters unclear: We have been led to understand that there is a great deal of evidence for criminal mistreatment of the home's clients, in its last few decades of operation. Now that the distraction of the murder question has been removed, one would hope that the investigation into this mistreatment, and into the connivance of those who should have put a stop to it, could proceed with more focus. In fact the credibility of the new people in charge will depend upon this happening. But, the removal of Mr. Power, who has hitherto been conspicuously firm in dealing with corruption cases, does not send a very reassuring signal.

Surely, thoroughly investigating small bones found in a place where violence is known to have been committed against children, and from where other children are reputed to have vanished without trace, is such an obvious necessity for the police, that it would have been a sacking offence for their Chief Officer, had he not done so. To remove him for properly carrying out his duty seems, on the face of it, to be somewhat perverse. There is clearly more going on behind the scenes, than has officially been made public. Senator Syvret's conspiracy theories may not be the only possible explanation as to what is really happening, and I would be hugely reassured to see them disproved, but the picture that the public are being shown at present is, unfortunately, wholly compatible with his sinister suggestions.Perhaps Mr. Power has done wrong in subtle and technical ways beyond my lay understanding. Or perhaps he has just been stubborn about going where his masters told him not to.

The public of Jersey must be given much clearer explanations than we have seen this week, of why so many of this year's shocking revelations are now seen as unusable evidence, or else, contrary to our government's desires, we shall lose all faith in the integrity of our police. Are the items found now known to be not what they first seemed, and the statements given revealed as packs of lies? Or is it all still sound stuff, but just not quite enough to keep a defence lawyer from claiming that the case is not proven to the proper standard of beyond all reasonable doubt? If it is merely insufficient, then the rationale remains, for bringing surviving abusers, and any others, who shirked their public duties as a personal favour to the abusers, to belated justice, and the investigation must continue, vigorously.

And another thing about the Waterfront

One could find fault with the aesthetics of Jersey's Waterfront development – blotting the main aspect of the town with drab, grim and oversized commercial buildings. One could question the environmental quality of the deliberately crowded office and apartment blocks - afraid to sacrifice any saleable floor space to make the area as a whole humanly comfortable. But, most of all, it is the economics that seem absurd. Our ministers talk in awed and reverential terms of the mighty sums of money at stake, but the hypnotic effect of reading all those noughts on the ends of the figures seems to stun them beyond any grasp of the who and how.

For a start, the future of the finance industry, that it is meant to provide a new home for, is currently looking a lot less rosy than its immediate past has been. Expressing official confidence in its continuing health can only help with damage limitation. However, backing the words with nine figure investments is gambling with imprudently high stakes for the unfavourable odds. Beyond that, though, nobody is explaining how the economics work out to Jersey's benefit in the long term. I think that is because they actually do not.

For a start, the States would like Harcourt to invest about a third of a [financial] billion pounds in constructing the monstrosities in the first place. All that inward investment sounds impressive, so long as you don't think about it very hard. But, not all of that vast sum of money is going into the local economy – much will pass straight through. Many of the contractors will be temporary migrants, just here for the job, and spending most of their earnings, and paying their taxes, back home, wherever that may be. There will, doubtless, be a good bit of Ronez concrete and Simon sand used, but the rest of the materials will come from off-island, perhaps with a little mark-up for a local builders' merchant, but more likely bought direct. The architects and other providers of professional services will also be off-island. In fact, the money that is actually injected into Jersey's economy by the development will probably be an order of magnitude less than the headline figure.

Even that much would be nice, if only it would stay in circulation for a little while. However, all that inward investment was just the sprat to catch the mackerel. (Or sand-eel to catch the mackerel, to Jersify the cliché) Harcourt are going to want to see their third of a billion pounds coming back to them, with a nice fat profit on top; say half a billion altogether in property sales, or fifty-odd million a year in steady rents. If they don't, there is no point in them being in business – they might as well put their money in safely guaranteed Irish bank accounts. They will have sucked more out of Jersey's economy than they ever put in, before the fresh, new look has faded from the buildings in the salty air. And, if they sell, the buyers will doubtless finance their purchases with loans that pay interest to bank owners elsewhere, while draining the money to service them out of Jersey's economy. It all adds to Gross Domestic Product, which makes the economy look bigger, but if you look at the flows, instead of just the totals, it begins to look like a lethal wound bleeding it dry.

Or maybe the offshore finance industry has fewer years of large scale operation left in it, than it will take to build the Esplanade finance quarter. Then will we be left with unfinished blocks looming over the town, as signs that we are now closed for business? Even if we had to pay to soothe Harcourt's burned fingers, it may be the better value option.

Yippee!! Er, but...

After so many years of George W Bush's abominable disregard for both non-Americans and even the humbler members of his own nation, it is heartening to see the American people turning to a President who promises a more principled, enlightened, informed and caring approach to his duties. Not only will the United States of America become a more agreeable place than they have been, but he is placed to exert a beneficial influence on almost the whole wide world.

I say almost: Obviously, there are a few isolated dictatorships that do not engage with international affairs enough to care what leads America takes for better or worse, and sadly, there are a few places that engage with the world in a negative and harmful way, and would lose out by a raising of standards in international trade and economic interactions. That bit is a worry to me: Much as I applaud Obama's positions on everything I have seen him quoted on, I happen to live, comfortably and happily, in one of the few places that his just and principled policies could seriously hurt.

So, pleased though I am, as a citizen of the world, to see the best man win, my joy is tempered by looking around me, and wondering who and what would be left in Jersey, should he see through his ideas on fair taxation, for, despite all the sophistry with which our “finance” industry defend their activities, and the willingness of us all, myself included, to share in the trickle-down, it is all about finding alternatives to fair taxation for the clients. If their loopholes get bricked up, back home, then what else do we have to offer? It will be years, rather than months, before he could turn the status quo around on tax avoidance, but we need to start preparing against it, instead of blithely charging on with “business as usual”. It will never be how it was for the last thirty years again, and if a layman like me can read the signs, so, surely, can the expensive advisers to our government. How long before our ministers take them on board, too?

Jammed-up Thinking

Once upon a time, which is how fairy stories traditionally begin, the States of Jersey had a plan for how to develop the big patch of newly reclaimed land behind the new marina. Very nice it looked too, with artist's impressions of tidy little houses interspersed with pleasant green parkland. A generation of senior politicians, and an up-and-coming junior one called Deputy Walker, countersigned the plan, and off we were about to go. Except that the idea, of doing something nice with the Waterfront land, did turn out to be just a fairy tale.

The States handed responsibility for implementing it to a badly designed quango, the Waterfront Enterprise Board, that suffered from the double burden of being , both, too commercialised to properly consider the public interest and, also, too politicised to make sound business decisions. And so, WEB started going their own way, putting up plans that were nothing like their original brief, and getting them rubber-stamped by the next generation of politicians, headed by one Senator Walker, who sadly failed to defend the old plan he hed been a party to. And so various office blocks, hotel blocks and apartment blocks, of grandiose scale, but tawdry design, have already gone up, along with an eyesore leisure centre that killed the popular cinemas and swimming pool that were already established in the older parts of town. Probably the best thing, although poor value for money, was the new bypass road from the old harbour to West Park, that significantly improved traffic flow.

Now, the final stages of the Waterfront development are approaching, and islanders are realising that they ain't seen nothing yet. The new vision is to draw all the banks and other financial service firms out of their smart modern offices all around St Helier, to concentrate them in a new financial quarter on the Waterfront. Hopefully, someone in government knows something I don't about all the companies desperately waiting for office space to come vacant in central St Helier, or else it is going to be reduced from a surprisingly vibrant and prosperous area to a sad, run-down ghost town. But, look at the mess that they are planning, to accommodate the finance sector in its new home.

The first thing that we shall notice, is the loss of half of the bypass road. It takes up too much valuable building land, so it will have to go, to be built over. Later they hope to dig a tunnel to reinstate it in, if the money has not run out, due to times changing for the worse. Remember, this district is called the Waterfront, on account of it being right next to the sea; in fact it was the sea, and a nice spot to swim in, not many years ago. The tunnel design has obviously come from a team where no-one at all understands how storm surges work. In the meantime, of course, traffic flows will be disrupted for several years, as the traffic, that makes the doomed road so busy, has to take alternative routes, which they will need to remember, for the days when the tunnel is flooded.

When we do get the road back, the engineers think that the financial quarter will generate an extra seven hundred cars per day on it. I know that the busy car park that has occupied part of the building plot since the reclamation was finished is due to go, but I have not heard of a plan to replace it, let alone add seven hundred more spaces to the area's parking capacity. So the seven hundred commuters will have to park in the centre of town, as they do now, and walk further, instead.

There is a worrying ambiguity about that estimate though: It could be that they are expecting seven hundred extra car users, who are not already commuting to St Helier, to be coming to work in the new financial quarter. This would imply that there is a plan to build seven hundred out-of-town houses or flats, just to accommodate new immigrants coming to work in the offices. Jersey already has a grave housing shortage, except for a glut of small flats, and it is not doing its existing residents any favours to earmark a major home-building scheme for newcomers off the boat. Almost everybody in Jersey already feels that it is over-populated for its space and resources, and planning major immigration is not at all the solution.

Then, one has to wonder if the rationale for the financial quarter is still quite as strong as it was a few weeks ago. The dominoes are still tumbling in the international finance industry, and at the very least, it is going to suffer a period of instability. When it does settle into a new order, it is clearly not going to be carrying on from quite where it left off. Obviously, the authorities have a duty to be upbeat - any talking down is too likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy - but backing the talk with massive investment, at this stage, is no way to maintain a reputation for safe hands. Jersey may be in a position to restructure its finance industry to remain competitive, in a world that is turning against the practices, that were initially the industry's purpose, but it would be premature to count on it. If the international banks and financial service providers find that they need to pull back their offshore commitments to survive in the new post-crunch world, then the offices will stand empty, priced beyond the sunken market rents, to maintain the book value of the collateral they provide the developers. Surely, the States need to shelve the project until the future shape of inernational financial services becomes clearly visible - it is all a murky mess of maybes and perhapses at present.

And the other cloud, that may or may not blow away, is that WEB and the States have insisted on a lead developer with troubles of their own. There are a couple of current court cases testing their probity at present. [I have no reason to suppose that they will not be exonerated, so I don't want to hear from their lawyers, but nor would I wish to libel their accusers by suggesting that the courts would not find merit in their claims.] If there does turn out to be substance in the claims, then they would not be the type of firm that the States should be doing business with . Therefore, it would seem prudent, for this reason too, to suspend the project until they are cleared.

If the project were to be put on hold for a few years, then landfill could be resumed on the site, to raise the land level so that the road could be turned into a tunnel without sinking it. Given that the only question about rising sea level is how much, not if it will, raising the buildings and keeping the road above sea level would be a sound strategy.

Food for Thought

As my wife followed the latest Jamie Oliver series, on promoting healthy home cooking in the junk-food loving back streets of Rotherham, I caught a few bits of it too. Beyond the formulaic reality TV mixture of sad and happy stories of everyday folk, there was some thought-provoking stuff, too.

Although Mr. Oliver's remarkably poor way with words, for a professional broadcaster, has discouraged me from watching his previous programmes, there can be no doubt that he has a flair for creating recipes that will be a pleasure to eat, underpinned by a sound understanding of basic nutrition. Moreover, and this is what I really admire him for, he is passionately committed to using his celebrity status to promote the cause of healthy eating, for the general benefit of Britain's public health.

While I have only praise for young Jamie's work, there must have been a long-term, large-scale failure by many others, for there to be a problem for him to tackle. Three generations ago, the British government ran an unprecedented campaign to teach its citizens how to cook well with the meagre ingredients available at a time of national hardship. The pioneering celebrity chef, Marguerite Patten ( who made a brief cameo appearance in Jamie's programme) did her work well enough for the post-war baby boom generation to grow up as the healthiest and best-nourished in all of history. But, somehow, that knowledge has not stuck. At least the girls of the baby boom were taught cookery at school, maybe under fancy titles such as home economics or domestic science, but, by and large, they do not seem to have passed it on in turn to their own daughters, who tend to get a more academic education these days, let alone their sons. There seems to be an element of snobbery or inverted snobbery in the problem: Concern about the quality and balance of one's diet is largely seen as a middle-class thing, and too many working-class people despise it as effete and pretentious, while regarding the consumption of calorie-dense, but nutritionally poor, traditional fare as robust and honest.

We need to come not full circle, but full spiral, to a place above where we were before, in which not just girls, but boys, too, receive a thorough grounding in nutritional principles as a key part of their schooling. Eating well has been a cornerstone of our national well-being through my lifetime, but it is in decline. Every year the obesity statistics get worse and the projections worse still. Today's children are likely to grow up no healthier than their great-grandparents, and if their children in turn are to regain the fitness that the baby boomers took for granted, then understanding food, under whatever title, must return as a fundamental ingredient of the National Curriculum.

Until the day comes that people can cook again, the other thing that needs looking at is the quality of the ready meals they eat instead. The authorities are far too laissez-faire about what may be put into them, and at present even explicitly permit sharp practices in the labelling that are deliberately calculated to mislead the unfortunate purchaser. If we are not going to teach people to cook, at least we could make sure what is cooked for them is good.

Getting Lonely

Two of my favourite blogs have reached the end of the line this week. The author of A Holiday In The Sun is emigrating, while The Moving Finger has been forced off the web by threats. I shall miss them.

The threats to The Moving Finger are a disturbing development. I don't know who he is or what his circumstances are, but obviously his position is insecure and open to attack in some way. Yet, the internet is supposed to provide a safe medium for the disadvantaged to be heard. My own personal situation is fairly secure. I am too small a fish to be worth the cost and risk of assassination, and there is no other way they can get to me. I don't need to be brave, therefore. TMF, however, was commendably courageous to try fighting from a position of weakness, and it is a shame and a disgrace that his enemies have been able to force him to quit. I just hope that he gave himself away by something that he wrote, and has not been betrayed by a breach of confidence at blogspot.com. If a major blog host could not handle political material securely it would be an international scandal.

Have the Goalposts moved, now?

All the hopefuls currently running for election in Jersey will, or, at least, should, have considered rough estimates of how much their manifesti would cost to implement. In the month since they drew them up, though, two things have thrown a dark shadow of doubt over everybody's costings.

Firstly came the news that States Departments have not been following best practice in their accounting techniques, and that properly prepared accounts would show a picture of very much poorer financial health than has been commonly believed. On the one hand, this makes ministerial spin look even more hollow and untrustworthy than ever: No longer can they stand for re-election on a boast of how tightly they have run their ships. But, on the other hand, the unreliable accounts also mean that the ministers' challengers have been preparing their alternative strategies from false starting positions. If the top line is wrong, anything that you do, that would produce a satisfactory bottom line from it, will also be wrong.

Then, just to make matters worse, the global finance industry has suffered its worst setback for decades. Our Ministers, whether from an obligation not to “talk Jersey down”, or from a genuinely deluded view of what is going on both here and elsewhere, assure us that Jersey is well placed to avoid all the troubles besetting the rest of the world, and will be able to carry on expanding its finance industry as usual. On the face of it, arcane sharp practices and virtual money playing a global game of musical chairs are both what got the world into the current mess and the foundation of our own economy. The official spin is that we are up to different tricks, that have not gone wrong yet, so everything is going to be all right. Hoping that they are correct is one thing, and I certainly do, but believing it is quite another.

Now, if the projected expansion of Jersey's economy is suddenly replaced by a rapid and substantial shrinkage, the projected revenue figures that the Ministers rely on to fund their plans, and the challengers their alternatives, will turn out to be vastly more than actually gets received, in a sharp contrast to the recent practice of systematic underestimation to ensure the appearance of spare money. Obviously, going bust would be unthinkable, and the necessary money would have to be borrowed, at a price. The government would then have to look at how much the new revenue level would be, and how much of that was going on servicing the emergency borrowings, and then slash the provision of all kind of public goods. If our politicians exercise some foresight now, however, and start looking at what should be sacrificed first in an economic disaster, then if the worst does come to pass, then they can roll back public spending levels to meet the revenue available, and at least then be able to spend it all on the remaining public services rather than debt service. If we are to have to borrow, then the place to start is financing major capital expenditure by bond issues, to keep the debt burden structured, controlled and predictable. This maintains investment in infrastructure, while maximising the amount of the income stream that can go on services and support.

Even the most cynical politicians go into the trade with higher aspirations than to be the one who stopped this, that and the other. Nor is it “sexy” politics to put in a manifesto intended to appeal to voters. However, all the aspiring candidates need to be privately thinking about how they would prioritise and target the spending of budgets twenty, thirty or even forty percent smaller than they were expecting to have at their disposal, even if their preference would have been for the tax-and-spend variety of left-wing government. A lot of things would have to go, and it would be the unhappy lot of the next government to face the angry public and explain why.
As well as spending cuts, it would be essential to tax the surviving economic activity more heavily. The deservedly unpopular Goods and Services Tax, would have to remain, and even increase, for far longer than many have been hoping. There are alternatives, as matters stand, but in a shrinking economy they are likely to vanish.

All this means that a new regime taking power will have a high risk of meeting with a big disappointment. And, to make it worse, all except the most analytical of people will blame them for the shipwreck happening on their watch, instead of blaming the previous watch for fishing amongst the rocks on a falling tide.

I am not saying that we do not need a change of government. I just think that there is an uncomfortably high chance that the task of a new one would be to manage catastrophe better than the present one would, instead of actually taking Jersey forward. I hope that those who will provide alternatives are preparing further alternatives to their first choice plans, in case the reassurances, that the global crash will somehow pass Jersey by, do prove to be unfounded.

Too big a job for anyone?

Frank Walker has not been a great success as the first Chief Minister of the States of Jersey. He has managed to disappoint his natural constituency of hard-faced right-wingers, by his spineless inability to provide political direction to his civil servants, of whom some would be better described as civil masters, as well as disgusting everyone else with his cynical willingness to sell us all out. Fortunately, his term is almost at an end.

Only, Frank's departure is not going to solve much: Who is the potential successor who can get the job right? The chosen heir, who may or may not be confirmed by the new House, is of course the Treasury Minister, Terry le Sueur. I must admit that I voted for him, when he first stood for Senator, on the strength of his track record at the Social Security Department. However, I fear he simply took the credit for his civil servants' work there, because once he was moved to front another team, at the Treasury, his performance plummeted. It is Terry who carries the can for the disastrous Zero-Ten tax scheme, to slash the tax take from locally registered businesses, and the equally calamitous Goods and Services Tax, to recoup the shortfall from all the people who gain nothing from Zero-Ten. And his reward, for such services to his island, is due to be the top job. In addition to his fiscal cynicism or ineptitude (take your pick), he is sadly short of the dynamism and charisma that give a natural leader much of his authority. Even Frank projects a modicum of vigour, in a school-bully way. There is not really any hope of Jersey's government getting a grip under his charge.

But, if we could avoid getting stuck with Terry, who else could we have? The chosen succession would probably be Phil Ozouf and then Alan MacLean. Phil enthusiastically and energetically backs most of Jersey's most suicidal policies – economic growth through adding population, letting economic diversity wither, letting predatory outside business crowd out local firms from our own economy and on the list goes. This swivel-eyed maniac with a Saddam Hussein grin wields too much power already, and would be an unimaginable disaster as Chief Minister. Alan at least has personal charm instead of sinister creepiness. However, he is rather a lightweight, politically. Beyond being front-man for some of Phil's initiatives, he has not made much impact in his first term, except for breaking election promises, and it is unlikely that anyone would put their name to his nomination yet.

It would be nice if we could get a Chief Minister from outside the present ruling clique altogether. The catch to this is that there are very few with both the experience and the ability to be credible. Simon Crowcroft briefly threw his hat into the ring, but backed out again, unfortunately. I am not a huge admirer of the way he has run St Helier, but he has at least shown that he is up to the job, and he is certainly a lot more sensible than Young Swivel-Eyes. Len Norman is vastly experienced, but not very highly rated by those who have tried to reckon up his achievements, and is turning his thoughts to focussing on his parish.

As a JDA member, I suppose that I ought to suggest Geoff Southern, but despite his unequalled abilities to grasp issues and crunch numbers, he is fatally flawed: The job entails dealing with a shocking number of fools, and he simply does not suffer them gladly enough to build productive working relationships with them.

Stuart Syvret is another intellectual heavyweight, who despises the lightweights around him too bitterly to show them enough support or leadership to win their loyalty, although he is way ahead of Geoff at selling himself to the general public.

Ben Shenton could be a viable candidate; he has the requisite charisma, and although his maverick centre-ground politics do not fully fit with either the establishment or the anti-establishment wings, he would at least be acceptable.

If the coming elections bring a significant shift in balance towards anti-establishment members, then Alan Breckon might be the dark horse to come through. After fifteen years of assiduous back-bench work, he has a solid grasp of the issues and ample experience of how the States function. I am not sure that he has the ambition to put himself forward, but a majority of members seeking to make a break with “WOLSATA” may well ask him to front them as their best hope; less abrasive than Southern or Syvret, more reliable than Shenton, a better team player than Rob Duhamel.

The real problem is that when the States cherry-picked the Clothier report's recommendations on reform to subvert them to entrenching the status quo more firmly, they made the Chief Minister's Job too big. Jersey only has a five-figure population, and if you draw up a job description that only one in a million could properly cope with, over ninety percent of the time you can expect it to be filled by people who are not really up to it.

What it means is that once again, the States of Jersey need to look at their own make up, and this time, instead of a little tinkering that has only made matters worse, make some radical reforms to see Jersey into the 22nd Century or further without more fiddling about. Constitutional reform is a dull subject, even for a lot of politically interested people, but we cannot afford to keep shying away from tackling it.