THE idea that a Guernsey politician is well placed to offer advice on how this Island should be governed will not sit well with our elected representatives or, indeed, many of those who elect them. That the Guernsey politician in question, Housing Minister Dave Jones, goes as far as saying that our new ministerial system is nothing less than a dictatorship will, moreover, fan the flames of resentment in many quarters.
However, before Deputy Jones is howled down and accused of at best exaggeration and at worst inflammatory nonsense, it is worth taking a cool look at what he alleges. It is also worth noting that his comments did not emerge spontaneously out of nothing. He was, in fact, responding to material posted on a website by our own Senator Stuart Syvret urging Guernsey to adopt party politics modelled on UK structures.
To begin with, therefore, we are dealing not with a random attack on the Jersey way, but a response from a person who saw our Senator’s unsolicited advice as an unwarranted intrusion into Guernsey’s affairs.
But what of that ‘dictatorship’ charge? It was clearly a piece of hyperbole, but when it comes down to the detail of Deputy Jones’s fault-finding, there are issues which deserve to be considered. This is because even the most ardent proponents of Jersey’s ministerial system should concede that it must be viewed as a work in progress rather than a form of government that can never be fine-tuned.
The notion that a cabal of top politicians – the Council of Ministers – takes all vital decisions behind closed doors without either scrutiny or the checks and balances imposed by the States Assembly is clearly over the top, but are we yet certain that the balance of power between the executive and other Members is perfectly pitched?
In his assault on Jersey and, in particular, on Senator Syvret, Deputy Jones makes the point that political parties evolve in response to public pressure and that neither Jersey nor Guernsey seems to have much appetite for their emergence. He might have added that democratic systems in general do not spring fully formed from the drawing board but require time to mature as their weaknesses and potential strengths become apparent in the light of real-world experience.