Maybe we were wrong to just squirrel so much away

IT was your leader (JEP, 7 February) that prompted my three-score-and- twenty-six-year-old grey matter to ponder what had actually gone wrong. Why were we in this mess with our infrastructure? You were right in saying ‘it is hard to escape the conclusion that successive political administrations have failed to assign sufficient importance to vital elements of the Island’s basic public sector facilities’. You put the question ‘How has this been allowed to happen?’

I was as culpable as other politicians of the day who were persuaded that we should put aside some of that money which was ‘running out of our ears’ into a Strategic Reserve – more popularly recognised as the Rainy Day Fund.

What none of us anticipated was that successive Finance presidents/ ministers would insist on squirrelling away annual surpluses while resisting committee requests for much needed housing, road maintenance, drainage, parking amenities – one could go on.

Worse, possibly, was rejecting the principle of maintaining States property all in favour of limited capital spending on more glorifying projects. Only seldom were bits of the interest accruing on our vast reserves grudgingly extracted to meet exceptional demands. Some of these turned out to be flights of fancy or gross errors of judgement.

These many years of accumulated memories, properly termed ‘hindsight’ and available to all, have convinced me that we made some regrettable mistakes. The conspicuous one was that we never decided how much or, if, where, when, the rain had fallen.

All sorts of reasons were offered for the retention of the fund. The most unhelpful and insulting to the taxpayer whose cash it was, was that we must prepare to sustain any sector of the sacrosanct finance industry whose clients might suffer from its inefficiency and blame tax haven Jersey. ‘We must protect our name’ was the cry. It wasn’t our name it was only the reputation of a badly performing organisation that our senior politicians thought we ought to protect. Didn’t that Industry have the means to right its own disasters?

It goes on. Regularly we hear political boasts of our singular financial security, our lack of debt, our immense reserves, how clever we have been to keep our taxes low.

You righty pointed out in your leader that those past politicians had their eyes fixed on growth. Sadly this is still the case today – the disaster that is the Waterfront is but one of the hideous developments resulting from the preference of Mammon to God – for whose benefit I hesitate to suggest.

I can’t correct our past errors. I can suggest what we should have done, and what we should do in the future. We should have congratulated ourselves with the surpluses and immediately set specific targets to which they should be applied. On achievement another target should have been set and so on. But not what I suppose was the traditional ‘Jersey way’ – put it in a biscuit tin under the bed and forget it’s there when Phil Rondel’s drains or Don Filleul’s car-parks or Jack Roche’s hospital or a permanent shortage of houses are crying out for funding.

We could start now. That enormous and still growing fund could be used now to put right some of these errors of omission. Not all at once of course, and certainly not to underwrite further massive luxury dwelling construction. Let us undertake prudent expenditure, in the genuine interest of the public’s comfort and infrastructure, devised by minds more attuned to the present than mine can claim to be but, please, not tainted with the Scrooge mentality I have been at pains to criticise today.

This has been a longish letter. Many will say I am well out of order or even out of my mind saying these things, but I believe in them, and that’s good enough for me. I do hope that someone agrees with me, and better still, that they say so.