HAVING been accused more than once of being too supportive of St Helier Constable Simon Crowcroft, I suppose I’ll now get the boot put in for having the temerity to criticise him over his silly reaction to comments about what used to be called James Street.

However, the prize for the daftest comment in the renaming nonsense must go to the Roman Catholic clergyman who formally proposed the Rue de Funchal change at a St Helier parish assembly, Monsignor Nicholas France: ‘A negative vote would have been very damaging to community relations.’

You’re damn right it would, pal. There would have been hell to pay and it would have been attributable almost in its entirety to a failure on the part of this proposal’s proponents to test the water properly.

Given the amount of time, effort, political and civil service time, not to mention money, that has been thrown at the so-called consultation process over the last decade or so (with people like Simon Crowcroft, I have to say, at the forefront of the ‘talk to the people’ campaign), I now hear, both directly from some friends of Portuguese extraction and from the online comments I have read, that the Madeiran community (many get annoyed when they are lumped together as Portuguese) actually weren’t asked.

As ‘Caz’ (her family have been here for 40 years) said in her online comment, if anyone had bothered to talk to them they would have seen that the majority were either unaware of the idea or found it stupid. She added: ‘If anything, it has promoted racism.’
Another online correspondent found the whole concept ‘nauseatingly sycophantic and condescending to the Portuguese community’ – something which I have to say just about sums up my view and that of those to whom I speak.

The problem is that thanks to Mr France’s ridiculous and potentially inflammatory comment – it makes me think that if it had been said before the vote it could have possibly have been interpreted as blackmail – and the Constable’s grossly over-the-top reaction to anyone who dares not to support the idea, those like me who question the wisdom of this move will be deemed racist.

Well, so what? What we now have is a society in which questioning the wisdom (the expense, really) of having virtually every government form and notice printed in English and Portuguese, and questioning the need to employ special teachers to teach children English at school (or teach them in Portuguese) when my parents – in common with virtually every other child raised in a country parish in those days – learned English when they went to school at the age of six, is all deemed racist by the politically correct police.

I recall a complaint made against me by one of the do-gooders after I walked around town with two very attractive young women (of Portuguese descent but educated entirely in Jersey) and wrote accurately and honestly about the dreadful manner in which they were spoken to in Portuguese by young men not aware that their comments could be understood.

Apparently, by criticising foul-mouthed people I was being racist, according to my critic at the time, who perversely seemed to believe that criticising someone from another country, no matter how justified the criticism, was somehow racist.

Simon Crowcroft seems to have an equally distorted view of what constitutes racism. As one correspondent has already pointed out, where’s the street name relating to Bad Wurzach, the German town to which many Jersey residents were deported and with which St Helier has been twinned for many years?

If Simon Crowcroft wants a real example of racism, he need look no further than some of the appalling statements made at a parish assembly against that idea by some of those there, several of whom were well known Island residents.

It was out and out anti-German racism from people who tried to disguise the comments by suggesting that almost 30 years after the end of the war was ‘too soon’ to talk about reconciliation, and besides, it would ‘upset the old people’.

Shamefully, those comments were not stamped on firmly by the Constable of the day and the twinning idea was binned – thankfully not for ever.

But apart from traffic signs near the St Helier parish boundaries, the average person would be clueless as to the significance of Bad Wurzach to Jersey.

Nor is there anything to mark the significant contribution to the Island in the 25 or so years after the war of the Italians, despite the fact that many young men of my generation did not take kindly to their success in making local girls fall for their Latin charm.

As has been said, the whole exercise has been patronising in the extreme. Perhaps Mr Crowcroft should concentrate on keeping his parishioners’ rates bills down and Mr France on filling his church. I understand that there is ample work for both in their respective fields.

SO, the Chief Minister’s Department — not the Chief Minister, it should be noted – says that the matter of the disciplinary action against States Treasurer Ian Black is now closed.

It is neither the Chief Minister, nor Mr Black nor anyone in the ‘getting far too big for its boots’ Chief Minister’s Department who will foot the bill for this monumental cock-up. It is the taxpayers. That means that it will be closed only if we say it is. Is that clear, Chief Minister’s Department?

AND finally … why is it not a surprise that public employees are being ‘promoted’ immediately before retirement just to jack up their pensions? Is it any wonder that all the next three generations will do is fill black holes? What an appalling legacy we are leaving.