THE news that Jersey Telecom – the former public service which is now a wealth generator – is to lay off one in five of its staff shouldn’t really come as any great surprise to anyone.

While I don’t necessarily agree with all he says, I do have a measure of sympathy with the view expressed by Tim Langlois of the GMB union, who described the amount of competition being faced by Jersey Telecom as ‘madness’.

The trouble is that it’s difficult to know where to draw the line when it comes to the competition versus monopoly situation, simply because, to be honest, very few people trust the monopolies not to totally fleece their customers – a lack of trust which, sadly, has become more than justified in certain instances over the years.

On the other hand, how many would join me and Herself in bemoaning the demise – totally through allowing competition on the route – of Emeraude and the service it provided to and from St Malo in all sorts of weather over very many years. A good number, I would think.

My mate in Guernsey rang me the other day and we were chatting about this very subject. He said that many people over there breathed a sigh of relief when Flybe were refused permission recently to what he described as ‘muscle in’ on the inter-island route currently operated by Aurigny and Blue Islands.

Apparently, Flybe have services to Birmingham and Exeter which call in at both Jersey and Guernsey and they wanted to fill seats between the islands by being able to sell tickets just for that section of the journey.

Like me with Condor when it muscled in on a perfectly good service provided by Emeraude, my mate views Flybe with much the same disdain and told me that as far as he was concerned, Aurigny and Blue Islands served the islands perfectly adequately.

As to Jersey Telecom, there is a wealth of information about the outfit on its website, including the fact that its head lad pulled down £3,375 a week last year, its chairman attended 13 meetings and got paid forty grand and in the last decade it has made about £135 million profit.

Unfortunately, even in its ‘latest news’ section there is nothing at all – not one single word – about sending a fifth of its workforce down the road with absolutely impeccable timing six weeks or so before Christmas. Mind you, at least they had the decency to scrub any information on current vacancies from that section, so whoever got the backboard duster out there has earned a few bob towards this year’s bonus.

Tim Langlois suggests that there’s too much competition and it’s unfair. As someone who answers the phone when it rings – and can’t be doing with throwing good money down the drain by having a mobile just so that Herself can ring me when I’m fishing to tell me to get a loaf on the way home (I can think of no other use for one) – I am not interested in what other firms can offer me. Furthermore, I won’t be unless or until the bills for our landline get so daft that I’m forced into looking elsewhere.

No doubt one of the public sector’s more recent growth industries – this one’s called the Jersey Competition and Regulatory Authority – will have something to say about all this, or will they?

Will they or their political supporters – competition, no matter what, is by definition good, is their creed – offer some observations on Mr Langlois’s comments that it is competition which has led to the loss of these 80 jobs six weeks before Christmas?

In relation to the JCRA – and I hope no one there wastes his time and my money by responding to this when there are boxes of paperclips lying around uncounted and even unsorted (by size and colour, of course) – I am extremely surprised no one has commented on the ludicrous decision to fine the German national airline Lufthansa £25,000 for having the temerity not to inform the centre of the universe (the JCRA) that they’d shelled out three hundred and twenty million quid to buy BMI, which I think used to be called British Midland. No letters to this newspaper, not even any observations on the online version of the report, and certainly no questions in the Big House.

Unless some of their pensioned-off staff were stationed here during the war, I doubt that anyone at Lufthansa either knows or cares too much about this small rock. After all, it’s not as if Jersey is at the hub of its worldwide operations.

But somewhere in the fine print the jobsworths found that a BMI subsidiary does use our Airport and therefore, according to the rules, Lufthansa should have come to the centre of the universe to seek approval for this £320 million takeover by the German national airline of a UK-based airline which happens to have a subsidiary company which happens to use Jersey Airport.

One of these days someone – be it an international airline or some other outfit with a good deal more clout than this place will ever have – who has been subjected to this sort of nonsense is going to go public, with phrases like ‘tin pot banana republic’ and ‘traffic warden mentality’ (with sincere apologies to those good men and women who actually keep traffic moving), and they will have the potential to cause Jersey so much damage in terms of bad publicity that it will take generations to remove us from the list of laughing stocks.

And finally . . . Last week I referred (admittedly at some length) to the financial plight of the Jersey Women’s Refuge. In doing so I said that their annual grant from Health and Social Services was £150,000. Unfortunately, what I didn’t read was the subsequent correction which made clear that the figure is £190,000, a figure which still leaves a considerable shortfall for the refuge to raise.