The former Bailiff has a perfect right to his views – but what exactly are they?

A friend was talking about moving out of his flat. The reason? He lives in a nice place in the north of town, but a change was coming. A bad change. One that would make his life more difficult. What was it?

To put it in four words: the Millennium Town Park. ‘All the parking is going at the start of January,’ he said. ‘I’m moving out of here.’

I’m not sure what bit of it I like most – obviously there’s the bit that it’s got States Members trying to do something, and getting exactly the opposite

result. That’s probably it. The multi-million pound project to create the Millennium Town Park starts in earnest from the beginning of next month, and lots of parking spaces have got to go – mostly because they’re where a park should be.

To be clear, parking troubles don’t make the park a bad idea, and they don’t make it a waste of money, and they don’t make it a bad thing for people who live in that part of town.

But my friend’s parking problems do put up an alternative viewpoint to the conventional wisdom, which is not much more complicated than ‘park = good’. The conventional wisdom is still, I reckon, pretty solid.

The point is this: the Millennium Town Park has (the clue’s in the title) been in the talking and planning stage for quite a long time. And somehow, it still can’t be achieved without making someone’s life more difficult.

And this, this you’ve got to love: last week, Chief Minister Terry Le Sueur gives a speech to the Institute of Directors, in which he says that middle managers in the States have become too scared to make decisions in case they get something wrong, and that too many States Members are fixated on finding people to blame instead of getting things right.

There may be some truth in what the Senator says – the first point is one made by the Comptroller and Auditor General, Chris Swinson, not so long ago. He said that fear of having their names attached to something that goes wrong makes civil

servants more likely to avoid risks and changes, and stick with an imperfect system. Obviously, that’s not a good thing.

And the second point is a reasonable one too – there are too many States Members focused on taking scalps when things go wrong, but that may be because they’ve got nothing better to do. So it’s all pretty reasonable stuff. So forgive me for saying this, but isn’t Senator Le Sueur’s point about middle managers too scared to do anything and States Members hellbent on finding people to blame at all costs, just another way of blaming other people (in this case middle managers and States Members) for things going wrong? Isn’t that just

obviously true?

It’s a brave thing for a Chief Minister to lay into middle managers within the public sector but on this occasion, wouldn’t Senator Le Sueur’s logic have been better served by explaining what he planned to do about it all?

The sense of bravery and openness must be catching. Sir Philip Bailhache, the former Bailiff, has broken ranks in a fairly spectacular way to shine a new light on the relationship between Jersey and the UK.

In a letter to the JEP, Sir Philip wrote that the UK Treasury department has been ‘unfriendly or hostile’ to Jersey’s interests – barring, he says, a short period after 2002 – and it is they and not the EU who are driving resistance to the Crown Dependencies’ tax systems.

Exactly how this statement should be read in the context of the usual stuff issuing forth from the Council of Ministers about a strong and healthy

relationship between the UK and Jersey isn’t precisely clear.

Nor is it precisely clear whether anything else should have been expected from Sir Philip, who appears to be shifting from years of what looked like purely academic consideration of independence from the UK, towards more openly agitating towards it.

What is clear is that his public statement on the situation over the dispute with the EU, or possibly the UK, over Jersey’s corporate tax system does not square exactly with the picture coming from the Council of Ministers. That should be clarified.

What is also clear is that in any capacity: lawyer, retired judge or Jerseyman, it is entirely open to Sir Philip to hold whatever views he pleases on the attitude that Jersey should take in its dealings with the UK. As a man with decades of public service behind him, his views should be taken seriously.

But it would help to put those views into context if he explained, in simple terms, whether he thinks that Jersey should seek independence from the UK or not.

Even if it’s just to correct muddleheaded people like me who think that’s what’s going on here.