A Week in Politics

It would burst out one December morning in the States, pages spewing forth and venting ugly numbers until States Members, scared out of their minds by the scale of the thing, would hurriedly vote it through and rest peacefully for another year.

Now, it’s very different. The spending is taken care of in the Business Plan debate during the summer, and the Budget is effectively a simple exercise that balances the books.

Duty on fuel, tobacco and alcohol go up, tax allowances are frozen, they might mess around with stamp duty – but the differences are slight.

And now we’re more accustomed to tax changes, tax debates and tax reviews – which like all States reviews are either ‘fundamental’, ‘comprehensive’, ‘robust’ or all three – on a far grander scale. Having had to swallow GST and the hoovering away of tax allowances, the idea of another couple of pence on a pint of beer doesn’t really bother us as much anymore.

It’s like asking a football team who have just thumped Barcelona at the Nou Camp how worried they feel about the prospect of an FA Cup home tie against Macclesfield Town the following week. Basically, not very.

We’re so inured to bad news about tax that 10% rises in duty on fuel and tobacco feel almost like a let-off. Strange, really, when you remember that we’re essentially governed by a bunch of small ‘c’ conservatives, many of whom are so wealthy that they have only a passing acquaintance with the notion of cash.

Anyway, it seems that the Council of Ministers have noticed this shifting of the expectational goalposts. Their Budget – published last week – includes the aforementioned 10% duty rises, the beginning of stamp duty on share transfer flats, another phase of income tax allowances wiped out, and the return of a vehicle emissions duty.

Six years ago, the Angry Men organised a 2,500-strong protest in the Royal Square over a Budget that went not half so far. But beyond a few people whose business it is to sell dutied goods – booze, fags, petrol and property – and who therefore have an axe to grind, if not swing, there has been very little in the way of reaction.

But maybe the ministers got this one right – maybe people accept (however grudgingly) that given the health costs associated with drinking and smoking, the crime and social cost that comes with drinking, and the fact that fuel prices are only really going one way from now on anyway, that it makes sense to tax them more.

Maybe it makes sense to close the loophole that allows people to trade share transfer flats worth hundreds of thousands of pounds without the taxman seeing a penny of it. Maybe it makes sense to force people with expensive gas-guzzling cars to cough up some cash.

Maybe, and don’t say the words aloud, this is a good Budget, a sensible Budget, a fair Budget.

Maybe it is. Except that, well, there’s a lovely little bit of spin in there about where all the extra money is going to.

Ministers say that the tobacco and alcohol duty is going to the Health department to fund more nursing positions and better respite care and that the fuel money is going towards a package of ‘green’ initiatives.

Nice. See what they did there? Tax the bad and nasty to provide the nice and fluffy.

There’s no problem with it, apart from the fact that it’s complete nonsense. The money the duty raises isn’t separated out and stuck into a separate account to pay for nurses, trees and kittens. It goes into the big pot.

It would, therefore, be almost as accurate to say that the £900,000 from the tobacco increase will be used to pay the salaries and bonuses of the staff at the much-loved Waterfront Enterprise Board, and that the £600,000 from the alcohol increase will cover the compensation the States paid out earlier this year over the Trinity infill saga.

Except you can’t really imagine them putting it like that, can you?

Here’s a thing – a week tomorrow, on the day of the next scheduled court hearing in Senator Stuart Syvret’s case about data protection and driving licences, someone is going to have to decide whether to ask the UK police to arrest a Jersey politician and force him to return to the Island.

And that’s an odd state of affairs.

What’s even odder is that if they don’t – or, imagine it, if they try and he goes on the run – he’s got until around 23 April to get back to Jersey, or he loses his seat. Under Article 8 (2) (b) of the States of Jersey Law, a Senator or Deputy forfeits his position if he is not resident in Jersey for six months.

While there is every chance of a strange argument about what ‘resident’ means in this sense, that would be a very weird end to this whole thing.