Five years of promise unfulfilled

Even in that charmed circle, there is some acknowledgment that the much-vaunted new ‘machinery of government’ has failed to live up to the optimistic promises made about it. Chief Minister Terry Le Sueur himself has admitted in the past that improvements could be made to a system that was introduced to replace a time-honoured committee structure dismissed as too slow and inefficient for the modern era.

A more frank and damning assessment has now been delivered by a sub-committee of Privileges and Procedures, the body charged with organising States Members (as far as such a thing is possible).

Their report paints a convincing picture of a divisive system which leaves many Members feeling unable to influence events, to gain access to official information or, in short, to have a fair chance of representing the public who elected them.

With a wider brief, the sub-committee might equally truthfully have pointed out that, far from ushering in a new age of efficiency and political responsiveness, the five years of ministerial government have seen States spending and payrolls grow, taxes rise and the quality of public services diminish, while the taxpaying electorate have felt steadily more disillusioned and disenfranchised by the effectively unstoppable application of executive power.

The system of government is, of course, not entirely to blame. The declining general calibre of Island politicians has played a major part too, as have some economic circumstances beyond local control. However, there is no doubt that the sub-committee’s recommendation for a major review of how the system is, or is not, working is one that must now be acted upon with determination and honesty.

Part of the trouble with ministerial government is that, despite the pomp and paraphenalia which attended its long gestation, it is essentially an off-the-peg version of local government structures also introduced throughout the UK, where cabinets, scrutiny panels and ever-stronger bureaucracies have become the uninspiring norm in many administrative areas. Unlike the States of Jersey, though, those councils at least have the democratic safeguards of party politics and freedom of information legislation to underpin the whole process.

It is at heart an English system shoehorned uncomfortably onto a community whose sense of identity rests crucially on not being English and which for many decades has been more used to doing things in its own idiosyncratic, but undeniably successful, fashion. The committee system, involving all States Members in government and pooling wisdom towards a more subtle consensus than the new system allows, may not have been perfect but nor, very clearly, is its successor. It is time to think again.