AS someone quite famously said just over 40 years ago, it was ‘a small step for man, a giant leap for mankind’. The 2010 Business Plan published last week was a high point, a zenith, and the product of many, many hours of hard work.

So many pages, so many words, so many graphs and so many numbers – it’s almost enough to make your head swim. But they did it folks, they pulled it out of the bag.

A new pinnacle was achieved. The previous high watermark for heartstring-tugging, poverty-pleading, fingers-crossed-behind-your-back cuts was around seven years ago, when then-Education Committee president Len Norman ‘reluctantly’ cut the budget for foreign language assistants in schools.

Cue outcry. Cue protests. Cue letter-writing campaign. Cue last-minute reversal. Cue budget restored. Cue everyone happy.

The Council of Ministers have smashed that record with cuts so breathtakingly cynical that a small part of you has to admire the courage it took to write them down.

Here’s a sample: Cutting baby milk supplies in maternity. Reducing heating in the General Hospital by five degrees. Putting up bus fares. Closing Environment Department visitor centres.

In case you missed it, here’s the underlying message – the States are so stretched for cash that if you cut so much as 0.5% (£4m from a £754m budget) newborn babies go hungry, sick people shiver, bus passengers have to hold whip-rounds for petrol money and we have to close down the countryside.

Ask yourself, when did you see a package of cuts proposed that would have removed funding from traffic wardens, or slapped a five-year pay freeze on everyone earning over £50,000 or capping overtime for all States staff?

Never, that’s when. And you never will either. Those things might be popular, and that would ruin everything.

Because, while ministers keep indulging in the kinds of games we have seen in the Business Plan, they don’t have to look at the kinds of savings that might get controversial, like cutting back on the insane pension deals in the public sector, seriously reviewing pay rates or supplementation, or looking at how much middle management we actually need.

And why look at those things at all? You can just propose cutting some cheap services that a lot of people use or come into contact with, killing three birds with one stone (how’s that for efficiency?).

First, you give the impression of a service at breaking point, where the slightest cut – and 0.5% ain’t huge folks – appears to mean drastic cuts.

Second, you can keep your fingers crossed that someone will lodge an amendment to restore your funding and put more cash into your department.

That’s why you don’t see the proposals to cut unpopular services (I’m picking on traffic wardens this week, but you can probably come up with a few more), or a pay-freeze for high earners or a cap on over-time.

And thirdly, you don’t even have to do the shouting, the moaning or the protesting. The unions have people who are elected and paid to protect jobs and salaries that will do it for you.

Remaining on the subject of the Business Plan just for a moment, the press conference a week ago saw a repetition of what must be a contender for the Most Irritating and Nonsensical Argument of the Year.

It was Treasury Minister Philip Ozouf who reminded us all, in case we’d forgotten, that Jersey’s economic situation represented ‘a far better picture than most other countries and most Treasury or Chief Ministers in any other country’.

Yeah? And so what?

We’ve got less rain than Bangladesh, less unemployment than Spain, and less knife crime than central London.

And that knowledge is about as much use as a false beard if you’re wet, out of work, or just been stabbed.
Can we finally put this line out to pasture please?

‘I don’t think they were duped at all. I don’t think it’s embarrassing at all. It’s just one of those things.’

With these words, Assistant Economic Development Minister Paul Routier breezily brushed away national newspaper stories about a teenager who landed a meeting with Airport director Julian Green after pretending that he ran an airline.

Embarrassing? Nah. Why would anyone think that?