THE big moan which led to the centralisation of the benefit or welfare system – and in the process replaced a largely, although not entirely, honorary system of administration with a salaried one – was that on occasions there was no uniformity between parishes in terms of what was received by claimants.

Mind you, the system improved out of all recognition in its later years when compared with the blatant injustices of the past and I daresay that the improvement coincided with the creation of the Citizens Advice Bureau and an altogether healthier interest in those injustices by the Island’s media.

I have no desire to knock unfairly those civil servants whose unenviable task it has been to administer the new all-singing, all-dancing system currently in place but even its most ardent supporters must acknowledge that its downside is that it appears to have replaced local knowledge and a desire to serve the community with a perusal of boxes, ensuring that essential ones have been properly ticked.

Of course, his critics will say that Ben Shenton’s headline grabbing statistics should always be at least halved but even if that perhaps unfair exercise is carried out, the fact remains that if the views of the bloke in the pub and the women in supermarket queues are anything to go by, the place which used to give work to the unemployed rather than adopt a ‘here’s your money, see you next week’ attitude may well have created a benefit culture.

Obviously, public opinion – and particularly the views expressed in pubs and supermarket queues – is sometimes based on third hand title-tattle and, sadly, malicious gossip; the sort of nastiness which quickly spreads about the national origins of the occupants of a new housing estate, to cite one of many such examples.

Equally obvious is the fact that there is no chance at all of reverting to the parish system, simply on the basis that having dismantled something and replaced it there can be no going back.

I don’t profess to know what the answer is but one thing’s for sure – going on at the present rate, whether it’s Senator Shenton’s figures or those of Social Security Minister Ian Gorst that are used, simply isn’t sustainable.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read Nurse Pryke’s comments about nurses not wanting to work here because, among other things, the cost of accommodation is too high. Leaving aside for a moment the irrefutable fact that it’s too high for everyone, my mind went back to the visit to Jersey all of 62 years ago of the then Duchess of Kent, later Princess Marina of Kent.

I have a feeling that the Duchess came despite the fact that there had been several reported cases at that time of polio, then called infantile paralysis, and of course this was before Joseph Salk first produced his anti-polio vaccine.

And the purpose of her visit? Her Royal Highness came to officially open a new nurses’ home on the corner of Newgate Street and Gloucester Street which was intended to accommodate nursing staff working at the adjacent General Hospital.

As an aside, there was a story doing the rounds some four or five decades ago that a young man on his stag night – in those days it was invariably the night before the wedding – auctioned one of his most prized possessions, namely the key to the aforementioned Nurses Home on the basis that he would no longer be needing it. I’ll give no clues as to who he was other than to say that I’m told that members of the police and nursing professions have always had an excellent relationship, but I digress.

The reason I said that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read Anne Pryke’s comments was that what I know as the nurses’ home is, I am given to understand, now occupied not by nurses but predominantly, if not totally, by – surprise, surprise – administrative staff. It’s an office block.

As Herself says to me when she’s banging on about something and I sit there with ‘that blank expression’ on my face, they just don’t get it, do they?

I’ve mentioned it before but I’m really getting the hang of this Internet thing now and (Herself says I’m hooked) I can’t help looking at the online comments which appear under news stories in this newspaper’s online version, thisisjersey.com.

One which drew a good number of comments was that on the decision to splash out the better part of a million quid – the ‘not much if you say it quick’ philosophy seems to have made a comeback, it seems – on providing the Opera House with the sort of facilities already available in a number of Island premises, a corporate entertainment area, whatever that might be when it’s out on its own on a wet Wednesday afternoon.

I’ve no doubt there’ll be even more in the way of comments when the story sinks in about spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on putting railings around the new Town Park. When that wonderful benefactor T B Davis created Howard Davis Park money to him was no object, labour and materials were relatively cheaper then than they are in the greedy Jersey that exists in the 21st century and he had two objectives in mind – to commemorate his son and to stick two fingers up at his former boss, who had owned the property.

Today, money in terms of what that lot in the big House have at their disposal, is tight – or certainly should be – and when things like basic services are being cut back there certainly isn’t enough to go round to waste on things like corporate entertainment areas and park railings, that’s for sure. As Herself says, they just don’t get it, do they?

And finally . . . So, we’re going to have ID cards to stop illegal immigration. Missing boats and horses bolting are the phrases which spring so readily to mind.