From Senator Stuart Syvret.
THE comments of Ian Le Marquand, advocate, former Magistrate and now standing for the office of Senator (JEP, 23 July) are among the most deeply disturbing I have ever heard from an election candidate in Jersey.

I know that Jersey grandees — with their natural presumption to power — live in a strange parallel universe, into which reality rarely intrudes, but Mr Le Marquand’s opinions are shockingly insular and ignorant, even by the standards of the Jersey establishment.

He says: ‘The issue about oversight of the police is based on a growing concern over a lengthy period of time that the police were increasingly operating as if they were a politically independent organisation. That predates the Haut de la Garenne investigation by about two years. It is a long-standing concern that they are operating without effective political oversight.’

The police operating as if they were a ‘politically independent organisation’?

This will obviously come as a deep shock to Mr Le Marquand, but police forces are politically independent organisations.
The States police do indeed —these days, at least — undertake their duties in a manner independent of politics, and of direct political control.

And the problem with that is?
There is a term for political systems that exercise direct political control over police forces. That term is ‘fascism’.
Every police force operates on a politically independent basis. The government sets the laws and sets the policies.
The police then undertake their duties within that framework — operationally independent of political control.

Presumably if Mr Le Marquand is elected we can look forward to a return to days gone by, when Jersey’s police force was told politically whom they could or couldn’t investigate, whom they could or couldn’t charge, which offences they could investigate, which media they could speak to, and which area of policing activity should be set aside because it might just be too ‘politically’ inconvenient.

It speaks volumes about the Jersey establishment that, in the midst of a child abuse atrocity of international scale, their candidates can so blithely, and without apparent embarrassment, speak of a return to the days of political control over the police force; an approach which has left this community confronting at least six decades of the most monstrous child abuse — 95% of which has remained concealed and unpunished.

That it is — finally — being exposed today is largely down to two things: the absence of ‘political’ control over the police force; and the brave efforts of independently minded officers like Lenny Harper.
6 Ralegh Court,
Ralegh Avenue,
St Helier.