THERE can’t be many opportunities for good laughs if you’re the Chief Minister.

What with the recession, redundancies, pay talks with unions, and a spicy little row about GST on food, you’d have to guess that giggles are a long time in-between on the fourth floor of Cyril Le Marquand House.

So I for one am going to get right behind Senator Terry Le Sueur if he wants to have a chuckle, a chortle or a snigger at Friday’s announcement that Guernsey have come up £52 million short in the accounts.

And I say that for two reasons: firstly, I’m from here, so I don’t like Guern-sey. They’re the Tottenham Hotspur of the Channel Islands — they carry on as if they’re important, they’ve got chips on their shoulders and they’re rub-bish at football.

Secondly, even if you’re going to moan about GST, ‘20 means 20’ and the failures of Income Support — as I do, and plan to continue doing — you’ve got to acknowledge the flipside.

This is that there’s mon-ey in the bank, we don’t have to start making tax decisions at a time when people are losing their jobs, and, well, we’re better off than them donks. The fact is that when the Council of Ministers were bringing in the 3% sales tax over here, there was a certain attitude breezing this way from Guernsey, a sense that maybe we’d jumped the gun and overreacted. Jersey had assumed the worst, and planned for it by whacking up taxes and sticking some money away for when things went wrong. Guernsey had assumed that things would work out, as long as the good times kept rolling, and made a few adjustments around the edges.

Now, on top of spending part of their reserves and borrowing £170m for capital programmes, they are faced with a bevy of tax options including an extra 1% on income tax, 3% sales tax, and a 100% increase in property tax. All in a recession.

I’ve never understood the idea that we should measure success or failure by the standards of others. There used to be a guy, whose name I can’t quite remember, who would say that Guernsey is more densely populated than us, or that the UK has a weaker preparation for a flu pandemic, as if those things somehow mattered.

Should we then measure success by the fact that our inflation is less than that of Zimbabwe (11,200,000% and rising…)? Of course not.

I don’t like paying GST and I don’t like paying more income tax.

But we’re a lot better off here with the tough decisions on tax already made, with £150m in the stabilisation fund, with no borrowing, and with our reserves (reasonably) intact, than they are in Guernsey, where politicians decided not to take decisive action.

And for that, the Council of Ministers and all States Members deserve a great deal of credit.

Still on the subject of tax and government revenue, it was interesting to hear that we’ve found some extra cash.

Treasury Minister Philip Ozouf said that last year’s tax take was up on what they expected, but couldn’t put an exact figure on it. Which adds some fuel to the slow-burning ‘GST on food’ fire, don’t you think?
It will certainly make Deputy Carolyn Labey’s proposition to exempt UK-exempt food and domestic energy from the 3% GST harder to vote against.

Last year an exasperated civil servant moaned to me that with increases in tax allowances, the GST bonus and supplements to Income Support they had effectively ‘given back the GST revenue on food three times over’. Which missed the point quite spectacularly, I thought. They only had to give it back once.

While I’m still feeling charitable, let me say that of all the things that Terry Le Sueur has done since becoming as Chief Minister, his scrapping of the screamingly awful and contrived Imagine Jersey nonsense was the thing that gave me the most encouragement. If he and his colleagues see the wood for the trees and stop holding this absurd line on GST on food, they might make a believer out of me yet.

I don’t dislike Deputy Paul Le Claire, but sometimes it’s hard to know what he’s talking about.
In an amendment to St Peter Constable John Refault’s States Members pay freeze proposition to give the £39,000 savings to the Association of Jersey Charities, the Deputy makes great play of the fact that States departments spent £85,000 on local PR firms last year.

He goes on to say, ahem: ‘Contrary to their stated belief in their current round of papers, I shall also be letting them know that in reality, contrary to their opinion, backbenchers face, at times, far more criticism from our media who are mostly “ON MESSAGE!” than ministers themselves.’

There’s a problem here. He didn’t find out about the £85,000 all by himself. He found out from the ‘mostly “ON MESSAGE!” media’, or specifically from the JEP’s Carl Walker, who tabled a Freedom of Information application to get the numbers.

If you’re going to slag us off, don’t use our own work to do it. And if you say you’re going to write about passing on your views about States Members’ pay to the appropriate review body (his report said: ‘I, for one, shall be forwarding my views to them again, together with the transcripts of this debate at a later stage’), then check the small print.

He tabled the amendment on 3 March. The consultation on Members’ pay ended on 27 February.