THERE he sat, fully bent over the desk, head resting in his arms.

To the casual observer of the States Chamber, he may have appeared detached to the point of unconsciousness – but what the casual observer could not have told was that St Martin Constable Silva Yates was about to give the best speech of the GST exemptions debate.

It was a speech of real quality during a day that saw little worth shouting about, let alone writing down.

And it seemed that when he got into his flow, Members started to look up, to give it the ultimate accolade – not the apelike stamping that echoes the most half-baked efforts these days, but to actually appear as though they were listening to what someone else was saying. Try to bear in mind that this is unusual enough to bear recording in writing.

‘I’m old enough to have lived through the hard times after the Second World War – if you haven’t lived through it you can’t comprehend what it was like,’ said the Constable.

‘I’m talking about really, really hard times.’

And he went on – talking about rationing, about income tax, about how a butcher might save you some offal as a favour, about how you would never, ever send a paperclip in a letter – how a thing as insignificant as a paperclip would be saved, and hoarded, and kept.

It was to his credit that the Constable didn’t seek to diminish the effects of the current recession, didn’t seek to play it down in a kind of economic one-upmanship, like the famous Four Yorkshireman sketch (‘By ’eck, you call this a recession? When I were a lad…’).

But his point was that as a community, we’ve been through worse recessions than this and come through the other side. And crucially, he went on to say that he feared for people on benefits if the proposals for UK-style food exemptions went through, that he was worried for those of his parishioners who would not get the GST component of Income Support any more, or those who would not get the GST bonus.

Needless to say, he voted against the exemptions, like several other Members who said that they could not support removing GST on food at the price of reducing benefits to the poor.

It’s worth referring to the St Martin Constable’s speech for three reasons: one, it goes right to the heart of the tax vs. benefits debate; two, to prove that it’s still possible to hear a good speech in the States Chamber; and three, that in the various incarnations of the GST exemptions debate (we have just had version VIII, and version IX is on its way) you could have been forgiven for thinking that everything that could be said had already been said.

The debate over GST exemptions has got to the point where it’s not even a debate any more – it’s more like a movie franchise, spawning sequel after derivative sequel. And like any movie franchise it has its heroes, villains, and catchphrases (in fact you could play a pretty good drinking game based on taking a shot every time someone mentions ‘jaffa cakes’, ‘Singapore’ or ‘green shoots of recovery’ – but you’d be absolutely smashed after 90 minutes).

Given that the debate boils down to a really simple question (would you prefer to use the tax system or the benefits system to distribute support to Islanders?) it is on the one hand hard to see how it has turned into such a well-established feature of the political calendar. There’s no point in asking the politicians about how it happened: they’ll just tell you that nameless constituents are right behind them, that the election will change everything, just you wait and see, and that people are always telling them to keep fighting the good fight – the only strange thing is that that’s the stock answer for both the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ sides.

It’s certainly true to say that this version of the States Chamber has come close to approving the GST exemptions package, with the 26-24 vote last December being significantly closer than last week’s 29-22. But the closest vote yet was when the Council of Ministers pulled a brief U-turn on the subject to support the exemptions just before the 2008 elections – leading to the 25-25 split that saw the proposal beaten by the narrowest of margins.

And that’s where the truth is.
The exemptions are a) close enough to being approved that any combination of a carefully-phrased proposition, the right people out of the Chamber on the given day, or a handful of speeches of real quality could actually swing it; and b) close enough to the October elections that Members really do have to think carefully about which side of the line they want to be on – and that applies especially if it goes through: being simultaneously on both the losing side and the unpopular side of this debate could be damaging to electoral health.

It’s no surprise that it took five days for a follow-up proposition to be lodged, and it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see one after that – more than one Member said during last Wednesday’s debate that the subject would keep on coming back and coming back until the battle was won. The most that ministers are doing by winning the exemption debate is holding off the inevitable – what’s surprising is that after eight debates in five years that message has yet to sink in.