AFTER a short pause, the States reform merry-go-round is creaking into life
once again.

Yet another attempt is being made to remove the Constables from the States, this time by Deputy Bob Hill; the Privileges and Procedures Committee, led by a parish Constable, have meanwhile resurrected the idea of scrapping Islandwide votes for Senators and introducing new ‘superconstituencies’, with proportional representation by Deputies unaffiliated to a particular parish; and Deputy John Le Fondré, a junior member of the ministerial inner circle, has called for a single-day general election – as promised by many election candidates last year – whatever the composition of the House may be.

Each proposal will find a measure of support among those who insist that some vaguely defined ‘change’ is essential to improving Jersey democracy, but none is ideal and each, in its way, misses the main point.

If it has done nothing else, the introduction of ministerial government almost four years ago has demonstrated that the declining effectiveness and public esteem of the States has less to do with the systems adopted than with the quality of membership.

It is difficult to see how any of the new proposals would help to break that vicious circle, now compounded by the poisonously acrimonious new political climate which Privileges seem powerless to improve and which, unchanged, will increasingly deter new candidates from coming forward.

The only worthwhile procedural reforms will be those which maintain the pride and community spirit of the 12 ancient parishes as their foundation. Privileges, with their arbitrary lines on a map reminiscent of some doomed post-colonial carve-up, seem to have lost sight of that central point, while Deputy Hill underestimates the symbolic significance of the Constables’ place at the heart of government and is, at best, premature.

As things currently stand, it would be sheer folly to remove a group of men and women which now contains some of the ablest people in the House and whose membership, by definition, is confined to representatives with intimate knowledge of local needs and their communities’ well-being at heart.

The ideological arguments for removing the Constables will no doubt rumble on, but the blunt facts remain that ministerial govenment does not have enough checks and balances and that the States as a whole does not contain enough high-quality politicians with clear lines of accountability to the electorate. Until that unacceptable state of affairs is remedied, probably through the development of full-scale party politics,

Jersey cannot afford for the Constables and their time-tested brand of common-sense democracy to be going anywhere.