THESE are the three great fibs of Jersey politics:
• I can make government more efficient.
•We must keep Jersey special.
•The States must work more closely with Guernsey.

Rearrange them in any order, add in some old flannel about children being our future, and you’ve got a pretty solid base for a run at a Senatorial seat in 2011 and around a quarter of a million quid over six years.

This genuinely isn’t picking on one politician, it’s picking on all of them. You could find variations of these themes in just about any manifesto published in the last ten years.
The sad thing about the three big fibs is not just that everyone tells them.

It’s that anyone would tell them at all. Only in politics do you have to state the obvious. Only in politics do you have to make a statement that isn’t a matter of choice or judgment, but a matter of sanity and rational thinking.

Consider what you would think of someone who said they would increase government wastage, would work to turn Jersey into a carbon copy of a small town in the UK, and would pick a fight with the donkeys. Alright, maybe not the first two, but that last one …

Anyway, that’s what brings us to the fun story of the week: the Tale of Two Incinerators.

To cut a long story short, we are half-way through building an incinerator which is Jersey’s most expensive capital project and which will, for the first 15 years of its 25-year operational life, have more capacity than we can produce rubbish for.

Meanwhile, in Guernsey they are about to start work on an incinerator at a cost of around £93 million – just less than what Jersey will pay.

There’s a bit more to it than that, though. Guernsey have to buy themselves out of their current incinerator deal and build a shipping centre (at a combined cost of around £7.5 million), and the extra tonnage would probably shorten the lifespan of the Jersey plant slightly. But that’s basically it.

The bottom line is that both Jersey and Guernsey would probably save money if they fixed a deal, and that all this comes against a backdrop of deficits in both islands.

Right. Now, remembering that pretty much every politician in Jersey wants to work more closely with Guernsey, remembering that every penny we make on this is money that we don’t have to turn into cuts or taxes as the effort to fill the deficit continues, and remembering that for the last ten years we’ve had to put up with constant nonsense about the ‘new spirit of co-operation and harmony between the islands’, how do you think this is going to work out?

They’ll fix a deal, right? Amusingly enough, according to a couple of States Members speaking on the quiet last week, the answer is: probably not.

That ‘new spirit of co-operation and harmony’ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, apparently. And having had a very strange conversation with a very touchy Guernsey politician last week, I’m starting to have doubts about it myself.

But it seems remarkable, to me at least, that there could even be any doubt about this at all. It seems slightly more remarkable that the Environment Scrutiny Panel could want to freeze the whole thing for fear of … gasp … being seen to interfere in Guernsey’s due political process, but there you go.

If Jersey and Guernsey can’t get themselves together to sort out a deal that saves money for both islands at a time when the respective financial situations are not what they could be, then the ‘new spirit of co-operation and harmony’ isn’t worth much of anything at all.

And, more importantly, this is a good time for everyone who has slipped a trite line about inter-island co-operation into a manifesto or speech to either do something about it, or for ever hold their peace.

AND so it’s back to the States today after three weeks off. So many things to look forward to, but one clear highlight looms. It’s not the two Jersey Democratic Alliance members and their different amendments on the minimum wage, and it’s not the prospect of being kicked out ahead of the secret debate on the suspension of the police chief, Graham Power.

It’s the Liberation Day debate. After the joys of the last debate – including such highlights as ‘9 May is Liberation Day’ and ‘This proposition sums up everything that’s wrong with the Island’ – how could you not look forward to it?