Promises, promises and the Minister’s U-turn when facing a particularly taxing problem

We get this: ‘I do regret that my position has had to change but what I said in my manifesto was said in good faith and I meant it.’

Lovely. No one’s going to write that on a statue any time soon. And that might be a good thing for Treasury Minister Philip Ozouf, who might rather prefer a different catchphrase – his own version of Terry Le Sueur’s ‘business needs certainty’, or Frank Walker’s ‘we are where we are’.

The quote was, of course, part of Senator Ozouf’s response to being confronted with things he said, long ago in the dim and distant past of the Senatorial election campaign of 2008.

Those things included such choice phrases as saying that he would ‘robustly oppose’ any increase in GST, and that he could give the States ‘a categoric assurance’ that he would not propose an increase in the tax.

This, the safely re-elected version of the Senator claimed, was made before it was clear how bad the recession was – an answer that’s easy to believe if you blank out from your memory the fact that the election came more than a year after the British government had to step in to save Northern Rock, or a month after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and just as interest rates started to fall.

The horrible irony in all of this is that Senator Ozouf doesn’t just have a good record on manifesto commitments – he’s got an outstanding one. A great one. A beauty.

In 2002, when he first stood for Senator, he and the other candidates were asked what they thought of introducing VAT in Jersey.

‘Never while I live!’ they cried, one by one, ‘Not while there’s breath left in this body!’

All bar Senator Ozouf, who calmly said that no, he’d rather not introduce it, but you know, it might be needed at some point, so it didn’t make sense to rule it out completely.

In 2002 that would have taken some nerve, especially with more experienced people around him so adamant and vociferous in their rejection of such a monstrous idea as a sales tax.

Within a few months of that election, the first of the Black Holes emerged, and his colleagues were falling over each other to find some way out of their election commitments – claiming that the GST proposal was different because it was at a different rate, or used different initials, or something, and they all voted for it.

The point is this: you could throw a rock in just about any direction in Jersey and be pretty sure that it would land on someone who doesn’t like Philip Ozouf – it’s just that reneging on manifesto promises wasn’t one of them, not up until the publication of the 2011 Budget anyway.

• Read the full column in today’s JEP