WHATEVER your view of the work of the current Council of Ministers, and that is something we will discover on June 7th, there is one achievement that is hard to ignore. They are still together.
That is by no means certain since the advent of Ministerial Government in 2005, and particularly since the current Council contains a diverse range of political views, and three Ministers from one political party for the first time. The Chief Minister has held them together, a task which will not have been straightforward, albeit their term of office has been truncated.
It’s a fact which has become even more apparent in recent days for two reasons. Firstly, the States debate this week over the level at which to set the legal limit for PFAS in our water. There can be few measures which were proposed by one Minister, only to be separately amended by two others. That includes the formal representative of Jersey Water, who it later emerged were given less than twenty-fours notice about the major proposals, ones which could cost them up to £210m.
It used to be called “agreement”, and that has somehow now become “alignment” – but this is at least one measure on which it is lacking from the Council of Ministers.
That might strike some as strange, given “alignment” across the disparate responsbilities of governing Jersey was exactly the purpose for which ministerial government was created.
However, there is another word which reveals perhaps deeper ideological fissures in the Council, one which regularly permeated news reports more than a decade ago: austerity.
It is emerging again from representatives of Reform Jersey, in the context of so-called “harsh measures” which were “unleashed on the Island” and “laid the foundations for the decline Jersey faced in the years following;” and which they attributed to the Council led by current fellow Minister Ian Gorst. That Council also included two other current Ministers, including today’s Chief, Deputy Lyndon Farnham. Strong criticism indeed.
It is no surprise that those clear ideologicial splits in the Council are now beginning to emerge, as battle lines are drawn, and positions prepared, ahead of the June elections; and in fact it is healthy from a democratic perspective that the Island will be given a clear choice of the different perspectives.
As well as dictating who is eligible to sit around that top table, the elections will also dictate exactly where that power balance will sit. Setting turnout to one side, performance at the ballot box is both a ticket to the room, but also an assessment of mandate.
