WELL, young Philip Ozouf has published details of how he proposes to knock 12 million quid off what that lot in the Big House spend, and interesting reading it makes too, although whether it’ll do any good or actually be achieved is another matter altogether.

I suppose it was as sure as God made little green apples and then gave man the wit to do something useful with them (make calvados) that school milk would be on the hit list, primarily because taking things off little kids is easy when it’s adults who are doing the taking.

I’ve lost count of the number of times that particular issue has been debated in the last 20 years or so, but it’s quite a few, and each time the kids’ lobby has won and milk has remained on the school menu.

I stopped drinking milk when they started playing about with it ’twixt farm and Chez Clement because I got fed up with spooning fatty globules off the top of my coffee. Besides, compared to calvados, it amounts to no more than a waste of valuable stomach space.

However, back to the subject at hand, and the boy Ozouf prancing about with the scalpel in his hand. Having read when he proposes to make the cuts, I have to say that some of it looks at first glance to be little more than typical civil service bovine manure, and I’m surprised he’s fallen for it. Perhaps he should have asked someone like retired civil servant John Arrowsmith to evaluate what the pinstripes were proposing before going public, but there you go.

Take the ‘saving’ of £910,000 by Health and Social Services in relation to primary care service costs, for example. Amounting to almost exactly 25% of that department’s total budget cuts of £3.7 million, I have to say that it looks pretty impressive –until you read the line relating to this in full. What it actually says is that the expenditure of almost a million quid is not being saved at all – the liability is simply being transferred to the Health Insurance Fund.

In very simple terms, so that most of that lot in the Big House will also understand what I’m driving at, the ‘saving’ to taxpayers is automatically transformed into an expenditure to those who fund the Health Insurance Fund.

And who funds the Health Insurance Fund? Why, people (and their employers), who pay a percentage of their earnings in what are loosely described as social security contributions but which, since about 1968 if my memory serves me correctly, have included a contribution to primary health care through the Health Insurance Fund. That’s who.

Is it a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, or have I put two and two together and got five? I really would like to know, because if I am right then this one example amounts to little more than a paper exercise of the sort that makes number crunchers richer and the punters on the street poorer.

It also destroys the credibility of the whole idea of our elected representatives actually doing something about the spiralling costs of a public sector which appears to be out of control.

I really am at a loss to understand the fuss being created because two younger members of our bunch of elected representatives seem to think that lots more needs to be done to explain to school pupils what government in Jersey is all about, how it operates and what it does – or at least something along those lines.

The first thing that springs to mind is that somehow I can see a whole new department being created just to feed the seemingly insatiable appetite for all matters political of our school pupils. Is that me being cynical or me just being realistic? Well, in my defence I’ve seen public sector jobs created on less, that’s for sure.

After all, as my fellow columnist Harry McRandle pointed out recently, in a scenario where more people are stopping smoking than ever before, the very same government that is threatening to take school milk away from five-year-olds also proposes to recruit a highly qualified (there’s no other word for it, with the requirements including two degrees and a minimum of three years’ experience) pinstripe to ‘lead health improvement approaches on tobacco’.

Or, put another way, persuade people to stop smoking lest they fall foul of the tobacco police – one of whom, so I’m told (although I’d love for someone to tell me I’m wrong because it sounds too utterly stupid to have happened), was waiting to pounce as soon as an al fresco establishment in town rolled out an awning because a few drops of rain had started to fall.

And of course, as Harry McRandle pointed out, no mention of the customary five-year residential qualification for this thousand-pound-a-week passenger on the gravy train, so it’ll be another import that we can well do without.

And before some pedantic little Percy or Priscilla from among the pinstripes leaves off looking out of the office window for long enough to point out that the salary is advertised at between £42,000 to £46,000, can I point out that this does not include ‘our’ contributions to ‘their’ pensions – a factor which, given the public sector pensions black hole that inevitably will have to be filled by us rather than them, means that the total package will probably be more than a grand a week.

Nice work if you can get it and to hell with the boy Ozouf and his scalpel – that’s the message it’s sending me.

AND finally … Home Affairs will save £100,000 if the discrimination legislation budget is removed, as is being proposed. Does that mean that we crapauds – paid up members of Jersey’s Minority Party, it seems to me – will have to wait even longer for the legal protection we increasingly need?