Use your vote – and hold candidates to account

After three years in which the first Council of Ministers have enjoyed a largely free hand in setting policy, this week sees the start of a vitally important electoral process which must include among its main priorities the restoration of democratic credibility to the way in which the Island is governed.

This will be achieved only if voters exercise great care in their choice of candidates and ensure, by intensive examination of their political claims, their past achievements and their personal philosophies, that the new States Assembly will be dominated by men and women who reflect the views and values of the majority of Islanders more closely than the current administration has shown itself able to do.

As the 2008 elections get under way in earnest with tonight’s Senatorial nomination meeting, it is important to acknowledge from the start the ways in which they are unlike any which have gone before. In the past, electoral winners have too often been chosen on the basis of political platitudes and vague promises about what they might achieve through muddling along in the consensual cross-currents of the old committee system. Those days are gone.

In the age of ministerial government, the imminent round of parish hall hustings and other types of campaigning can be neither an old-fashioned popularity contest nor an end in themselves; this time they are just a step in the process which will lead, come early December, to the election of a new Chief Minister and a new Council of Ministers, invested with enormous powers to dictate the nature of Island life from the smallest bureaucratic detail to the widest strategic direction. The Senatorial election, and those for Constables and Deputies which will run alongside and beyond it, must be conducted with that new reality very clearly in mind.

Three years ago, neither politicians nor voters had any experience of ministerial government. A traditionally woolly round of elections was followed by the creation of Jersey’s first Council of Ministers, led by Senator Frank Walker, and the rapid development of key policies which bore very little relation to the concerns raised during the election process.

Even if those policies were ultimately to prove the right ones from a pragmatic point of view, it is clear that any community which tolerates such a loose connection between public opinion and public policy is doomed to experience both the kind of disillusionment already felt by many Jersey voters and growing difficulty in defending its democratic credentials.

This time round, it will not do. In the general absence of the manifesto accountability which is provided in other jurisdictions by party politics, responsibility falls on the electorate to ensure that these elections focus on issues of genuine concern and lead directly to the creation of the policies and direction to which the new Council of Ministers will be bound.

While also taking great care to choose candidates of real talent and potential, voters should question them on policies more closely than ever before, not only at the parish hustings but also by letter, phone and e-mail.

It is regrettable that, by another quirk of our system, the putative next Chief Minister, Senator Terry Le Sueur, will not be facing the electorate this time round but three or four of his current colleagues on the Council of Ministers will be and the same need to improve levels of accountability means that they must reasonably expect to stand or fall by the extent to which they can justify the policies to which they have been party over the past three years.

It would make a mockery of the electoral process if the issues raised by voters over the next two months were to be ignored when the new House forms, and it would be complete nonsense in terms of democracy to expect the new Council of Ministers to feel bound by the strategic views of their pre-election predecessors.

Before that stage is reached, candidates should expect a more challenging relationship with voters than has existed in Jersey before, reinforced by the clear frustrations of Middle Jersey, those ordinary Islanders who have been effectively disenfranchised for the past three years and now have an opportunity to begin taking back the reins.