A Week in Politics

It’s the point where level-headedness, calmness and composure start to mean more than anything else.

It’s the time when every point, every goal, every knock and free kick takes on an almost supernatural importance and you can find yourself red-faced and screaming profanities at the TV over the slightest perceived injustice to your team.

Really? OK, that last bit might just be me.

Anyway, the point is this – the measure of a team’s success during squeaky bum time isn’t about the quality of the players, the tactics of the manager or the commitment of the fans.

It’s about how they handle pressure.

The best two recent examples are Arsène Wenger and Kevin Keegan.

The boy Wenger – whose strange brain is celebrated at every Arsenal home game with a banner reading ‘Arsène knows’ – is not known for folding under pressure.

He’s the picture of short-sighted Gallic cool, whether overhauling an 11-point lead to pip Manchester United to the title by a single point in 1998, or pleading ignorance of his side of dubious Frenchies’ limited understanding of the laws of the game, or even insisting that he won’t rush into panic-signings after his team got hilariously humped by Fulham on day one of this season.

And then there’s the boy Keegan.

Who can forget his performance in the 1995-6 season, when his Newcastle United side surrendered a ten-point lead to lose the Premiership title, and his legendary ‘I’d love it if we beat them! Love it!’ brainspasm on live TV.

Anyway, the point is this – States Members, and ministers in particular, are entering squeaky bum time.

And much as it might pain Chief Minister Frank Walker to acknowledge it – what with him being an Arsenal fan – the States, and his Council of Ministers in particular, have reacted in a manner more akin to the boy Keegan than wily old Wenger.

There have been so many U-turns by ministers in the past ten days that it’s hard to know where they are going, and harder still to know if they have any idea.

They’ve flipped on GST exemptions and flopped on free nursery care, though they argue that changing times call for changing strategies.

And they’ve lodged a Business Plan within the 3.5 per cent spending increase agreed last year, only then to come back with another £10m worth of ‘election friendly’ spending plans in a separate amendment.

The argument that they’re ‘letting the States decide’ would, I suppose, work in any other year.

But as things stand, with 44 States Members facing elections over the coming three months, you don’t have to have the mind of Arsène Wenger, or even Kevin Keegan, to figure out which way the votes are going to go on free nursery care, recycling, better buses, and GST exemptions.

And the end result, oddly, is a set of spending and tax policies that are arguably a lot closer to what the public want to see than at any point in the first three years of ministerial government.

But it means that we’ve gone another year, and are likely to go through another election, without a real debate on States spending.

It’s easy enough to trot out platitudes about more States efficiency and cutting non-essential spending, but it’s another thing to tell the public that the services they are used to getting are going to stop entirely, or start to cost them money.

That is a point that the three Deputies who stood on cost-cutting platforms, formed a cost-cutting group, and who failed over the following three years to cut any costs at all, are all going to have to deal with over the coming weeks.

For the record, they’re Deputies Alan Maclean, John Le Fondré and Ian Gorst.

By all accounts, it didn’t take the Council of Ministers all that long to change their minds on GST exemptions and the free nursery care. But it would be wrong, and stupid, to shower all the criticism on them.

When the proposals sail through the States, as they assuredly will, there will be a lot of Members changing their minds. Keep an eye on them – they’ll have pulled off a U-turn every bit as bad as the one the ministers pulled last week.

And lest you think that it’s just ministers having a bout of pre-election cash-lashing, a glimpse at the always-entertaining minutes of the Scrutiny panels this week reveals otherwise.

It seems that the merry band of pranksters known as the Environment Scrutiny Panel – remember them? – decided way back in June that they were going to spend taxpayers’ money on a trip for Constables to a recycling centre in Cardiff.

In the end, they were warned off by States Greffier Michael de la Haye and the Scrutiny Chairmen’s Committee – who are a bit like the Mafia commission without the guns, knives and horses’ heads – and the chairman paid for the trip out of his own pocket.

But what a trip to Cardiff has to do with reviewing States environment policy, I have no idea.

And according to the Scrutiny rules, that doesn’t matter anyway.

Because the panels can spend their budgets on pretty much whatever they want, as long as a review is ongoing (this works out pretty well for the Environment panel, who make a point of never finishing reviews unless there’s a vote of no confidence coming).

And if you think that makes sense, you’re a mentalist. And if you think that it’s OK for States Members to still be asking ‘What is Scrutiny?’ a full three years into ministerial government, then you’re a double-mentalist.

Because the five panels are going about their work at different paces, in different styles, with wildly differing success, and in utterly different ways.

And that leaves some very serious questions for not just the Scrutiny members themselves, but also for the people that came up with the system in the first place.