From the point of view of long-suffering taxpayers the saddest thing of all is that this comes as no surprise and it really didn’t need shelling out 60 grand plus expenses – sums resembling Monopoly money are the currency used by our lords and masters – to Jessica Simor QC to spell it out for us.
That said, recent political history has demonstrated time after time that what is as clear as day to the great unwashed takes an age to dawn on our elected representatives. A bit like telling Herself and her mates a joke and hearing the laughter an hour or two later from The Shed.
To be honest, I don’t know whether our politicians are arrogant or inept but I do know that the present shambolic situation – where every time there’s a crisis or a cock-up we get someone or other doing little more than paper over ever-deepening cracks – just can’t be allowed to continue. Indeed, I reckon it’s got so bad that had it not been for Brexit and the likelihood that discussions (battles might be a more appropriate way of describing the current round of name-calling) will continue for at the very least another couple of years, Liz Truss at the Justice Department (she’s the Privy Counsellor with responsibility for the Crown Dependencies – the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) would by now have rattled a few cages over here and told Prime Minister In Gorst to ‘sort it, or else’.
WHILE answering questions in the Big House last week about giving people lifts, Home Secretary Kristina Moore said that the practice might well be a good thing, in that car-sharing was good for the environment because it reduced pollution and also promoted safety on the roads by reducing the temptation for people to drive after they’d been drinking.
She also pointed out that, in effect, all those advantages went straight out of the window if those offering the lifts did so in exchange for reward.
Cynical old columnist that I am, her statement really begs the question as to how many people she knows who, out of nothing more than the goodness of their hearts, are public-spirited enough to drive around on weekend evenings until the early hours looking for people who need a lift home. A small handful, perhaps, although I very much doubt that the figure would even be as high as that. No, the huge majority of drivers operating these ‘Jersey lifts’ schemes are doing it in order to make a few quid, and if Deputy Moore doesn’t realise and acknowledge that, then not only is she naïve in the extreme but she’s far too naïve to be anywhere near a ministerial job, let alone a member of the Big House.
AND finally… I know the grey matter may well be losing a few memory cells but my recollection of the terms of this place’s relationship with the European Union differs a little from that of Astrid Kisch, who last week said that if EU immigrants come to Jersey it is because the Island lets them in by copying United Kingdom rules.
The phrase ‘lets them in’ implies that we have a choice. We don’t and never have had. They have an absolute right to come to Jersey under the same conditions as UK citizens because all of them are in the EU and that was agreed in the protocol relating to the Crown Dependencies, which was part of the document Britain agreed to when joining the then Common Market.
In essence, the deal was that we could export produce tariff-free to the EU in exactly the same way as we’d done to the UK – something which, in the days when agriculture and horticulture exports were more significant to the Island’s economy than they are now, was considered to be quite an advantage. However, it also meant that there would be free movement of labour for EU citizens but the downside was that this did not apply to anyone born here who didn’t have at least one British grandparent – something which remains a bone of contention to today.
