WAY off north, further even than Guernsey, there’s trouble. You might have read about it. Turns out two bunches of people who don’t agree on politics, who don’t like each other and who have spent much of the last 20 years shouting at each other got together a year ago to set up a government.

Unbelievably, it seems not to have been a runaway success. And here, too, there’s trouble.

Our coalition isn’t blue and yellow, but the divides are deeper. Our coalition is scarier still – it’s the yawning gap between what the Council of Ministers say on the one hand, and what they do on the other.

You get the feeling that if ever these two Council of Ministers – the talky one and the do-ey one – got together, they wouldn’t get on.

Personally, I prefer the talky version. Last week they announced that they ‘fully support the principles of openness, transparency and access to information’ in the Freedom of Information Law, and were ‘firmly committed’ to these principles.

They then went on to commit a bit of a crime against the English language by declaring their support unconditionally, except that it hung on someone coming up with some cash. But hey ho, you can’t have it all.

The talky version of Education Minister James Reed felt that this statement didn’t go far enough, and elaborated in another report on exam results.

‘There is a culture of openness between the department, schools and parents, not one of secrecy,’ he wrote, keen to hammer home the point that we’re not talking about future openness, or potential transparency but about here and now.
As is so often the case, the real and actual Council of Ministers seem to take a slightly different view.

Take the last ten sets of minutes for the Council of Ministers. Beyond the automatic stuff about what’s coming up in the States, or the regular joint meetings with Scrutiny, there are precisely four things recorded in the publicly available minutes: Senator Freddie Cohen’s appointment as ‘foreign secretary’, the U-turn on the abuse inquiry, an update on bird flu and a suggestion for a new Strategic Plan update system. That’s it. Bear in mind that these meetings go on all day, and that there were ten of them.

Take the recent report on the economic benefit of rich 1(1)k immigrants. Assistant Treasury Minister Eddie Noel says that not only is the report so confidential that it cannot be disclosed, but it is so confidential that we can’t even know who wrote it.

Take a moment and try to imagine a scenario in which that can possibly make sense.
Take the real Education Minister, who in the very same statement that lauded his department’s ‘culture of openness’ also insisted that releasing exam results was against his policy, despite the fact that a) they have been published, and b) his own department has accepted that it had to release them in the face of a request under the Code of Practice on Public Access to Official Information.

It goes on. But the point to all this is that you’re probably better off watching what the Council of Ministers do, rather than what they say they’re going to do. It’s not always the same thing.

It is worth noting that at the very first Council of Ministers meeting in 2006, the press got all the briefing papers that hadn’t been specifically put on the secret part of the agenda, including some very revealing papers about the risks of swine flu. It was carnage. It was fantastic.

(This led, indirectly, to one of the great moments in JEP Newsroom history. A little while later the Medical Officer of Health gave me projected casualty rates for a full swine flu epidemic, including the number of people who would die.

On hearing this, the then News Editor, Anthony Lewis, asked the immortal question: ‘Yes, but have you got their names?’)

This was all shut down fairly quickly, as the fledgling Council of Ministers scrambled to control the flow of information. It’s that need, and that desire for control that marks the real difference between the way that ministers talk and the way they act.
The conviction among politicians (not exclusively ministers) that the political agenda must lead the news agenda, and that it must be politicians who set that political agenda, is a wholly misguided one.

In almost all cases, they would be better off just relaxing about it and letting it go, stop worrying about it and get on with the jobs that they volunteered to do.
To put it another way: does anyone really give a monkey’s about who wrote the report on the economic effects that rich immigrants have on Jersey? Of course not. No one could care less. It’s not the story that’s the real story here.

THE news that the Health department is going to make £200,000 a year by charging insurance companies for hospital stays resulting from crashes is pretty interesting.

The news that insurance companies won’t be increasing premiums to cover it is an unexpected twist. But it’s the news that the Health department has had the power to levy the changes since 1989 but hadn’t got round to that really tells you a lot.
It also tells you that Hospital director Andrew McLaughlin (Mr £216,000-a-year to you and me) is pretty close to breaking even already after a year in the job.

He looks like a pretty sharp investment – certainly more so than any politician or senior civil servant who has been involved in the Health department for the last 22 years but who unaccountably let this slide.