Constitutional reform: Voters should decide, not self-serving politicians

From James Rondel.

IT would seem that a recess is a long time in politics. Indeed, prior to the summer recess, Deputy Jeremy Maçon attempted to introduce a mandatory threshold for debating the results of April’s referendum (P.39/2013).

In P.39/2013 he is quoted by Hansard as saying: ‘This is the point of the referendum; to put an issue of constitutional reform to the public to get a clear direction, so that we as States Members have a clear mandate to change the electoral make-up of the Assembly, if desired to do so by the electorate…

‘But if we do not get enough of them, how can we realistically say anything?

How can we do that and how can we be taken credibly by anyone?’

I would be inclined to agree with him, because I’m of the conviction that constitutional changes are of such fundamental importance that they should not be introduced haphazardly.

However, under his own stewardship, as your editorial (JEP 26 September) correctly noted, the Privileges and Procedures Committee intend to introduce constitutional reform having not consulted the public whatsoever, and with the predominant method of research being a questionnaire that was issued only to States Members, with its legitimacy being compromised when it was leaked on to Twitter, before the process was completed, by a Member of the States.

This methodology, putting the cart before the horse, leaves me wondering who the PPC’s proposition (P.116/2013) is aimed to satisfy?

In his proposition creating PPC’s mandate for researching electoral reform (P.74/2013), Senator Ian Le Marquand states that the ‘Committee should seek to consult with the Members of this Assembly in order to seek to achieve a compromise solution which is acceptable to an absolute majority’.

But is this really in the best interests of the general public? Shouldn’t it be the people of Jersey who decide on how best to alter their constitution and not the members who benefit from it directly?

Besides this, I’m still wondering if it is actually conceivable that the PPC did not gauge public opinion before coming up with their ‘solution’. They must have, surely?

So, if they did not renew a submission process to seek public opinion in the summer recess, just where would they have got access to public opinion on constitutional reform from?

A good start may be April’s £200,000 referendum that took place as a result of the largest public consultation process in the Island’s history. Hundreds of submissions were received, leading to the proposal of larger electoral districts.

26.24 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote in the referendum. 80.52 per cent of these voted to a) reduce the number of States Members to 42, and b) to reduce the composition of the Assembly to one or two types of member.

Now, at best, the PPC have rather carelessly failed to analyse the content of the submissions to the Electoral Commission (still available online), and the result of the referendum itself.

They have demonstrated themselves to be careless, amateur, and their end-product rather rushed. Or, at worst, they have actively decided that they know better than the electorate, as they have failed to satisfy either of two obvious conclusions that can be drawn from the result of April’s referendum, that I have identified above.

Apparently, we don’t need to be consulted on constitutional change because it is ‘temporary’. Ok, then assuming that we accept this rather odd argument and that our Assembly is now somehow capable of passing ‘temporary’ legislation that changes our constitution and goes against the grain of public approval, I’d ask all future legislation passed by this lame duck Assembly to be ‘temporary’, as it is becoming more and more apparent as the recesses roll by that our current crop of political ‘servants’ could not organise a tea party in the Members’ Coffee Room.