When our current political system was designed, the Scrutiny panels were intended to be a “critical friend”. Their comments this week are perhaps the equivalent of that friend sitting you down, and unleashing some home truths.
The whole point of the current system is coordination, and leadership. That’s what the Council of Ministers was created to do, demolishing the former committee silos, and leading us boldly into a new dawn of collegiate, collective and mutually beneficial government.
Of course, in reality, it does nothing of the sort, and that is no criticism of the current incumbents; what gets in the way is good old-fashioned politics. Priorities will naturally conflict, personalities will clash and agendas will divide, and in fact, the current Council has let slip considerably fewer of those divisions than any of its predecessors.
Readers of today’s JEP will note the comments of the current head of scrutiny, Deputy Inna Gardiner, about “…the lack of inter-departmental consultation, and leadership at the top,” before going on to list examples where she sees departments, and ministers, still failing to work together effectively, to the island’s obvious detriment.
Undoubtedly, some will dismiss those comments as being politically motivated, as just another notch in turning up the heat ahead of a pivotal Budget debate in December, and further out, the elections in June.
And what if they are? We elect our politicians to have views, passionately held, and to express them eloquently whenever called on to do so; we expect them to fight for what they believe in, because we have chosen to put them there to do just that.
Imagine the reverse – a batch of “friends”, so concerned with carefully phrasing their vaguely supportive (and rather dreary) comments that they forget the need to make them at all interesting; beige dominates, and everyone sleeps.
Correlation is clearly not causation, but regular readers might note that as local politics has gradually become more collegiate, more like a club, as disparate personalities have been encouraged to become “critical friends”, it has hardly had a positive effect on voter turnout. There is clearly no link. But it seems more fashionable now to have a consultative “movement” than a dyed-in-the-wool party, with deeply held political beliefs.
As the island progresses towards some major decisions around the cost of services, and the amount we are prepared to pay for them, it will be interesting to see whether our politicians begin to coalesce around some clear and simple positions, which voters can readily support.
