A sad day for Jersey in the States

By spurning the bargain of the century with their rejection of Chief Minister Ian Gorst’s proposal to buy the Plémont headland for public enjoyment in perpetuity, the States have sent out the very message which those who place profit before principle were hoping for. That message is that the interests of developers should outweigh the protection of Jersey’s environment, even when it means riding roughshod over the basic tenets of the Island Plan and the States’ own stated commitment to national park status for the coastline.

That can be the only interpretation of yesterday’s painfully close vote, especially so given that it was eventually taken on the basis of a proposed pound-for-pound financial partnership with the National Trust for Jersey which would have involved the taxpayer in spending what amounts to small change in terms of the States budget as a whole.

It was a crass decision, lacking in vision or courage, and the claim of its advocates that the money ‘saved’ by it will be spent on improving schools and hospitals, mending roads or helping old people is simply nonsense. Not a penny more will go towards those needs than would otherwise have been the case.

The intellectual poverty of that argument set the tone for a dispiriting display of this disappointing States Assembly at its worse, with the added irony that the vote was in effect swung by the decision of the spectacularly ill-titled Environment Minister, Deputy Rob Duhamel, whose position on the Council of Ministers is surely now untenable.

The defeat of the Plémont proposal must be a personal disappointment to its lead advocate, Senator Sir Philip Bailhache, who made an apparently irresistible case with skill and eloquence. It must also weaken the position of Senator Gorst, whose first year in office ends not with a decisive assertion of his influence over the House but with an embarrassing failure to win an argument on a major matter of policy direction.

It is, meanwhile, difficult to resist reaching the conclusion that some who voted against the proposition did so merely because it was brought by the former Bailiff, perceived by them as the embodiment of the so-called establishment.

Indeed, the spectacle of dyed-in-the-wool left-wingers flying in the face of the public good and supporting a development which will be of benefit to an extremely wealthy developer and those with the very substantial means required to buy property on the site’s projected luxury estate was an exercise in the absurd.