AS this is my first rant after the election, I would like to extend my best wishes to all those who have gained, regained or retained States office. Good luck – you’re going to need it. The marathon of electioneering you have just been through is only the beginning.

I am writing this before the results are known, but I predict the turn-out will be slightly higher than normal, although not by much.

Large swathes of the population probably won’t have bothered despite all of the razzamatazz. Many of them were put off by that idiot Hedley.

The problem Jersey has is that low turn-outs are not due entirely to apathy. You could forgive people not making the effort to vote if they simply didn’t care, but I suspect that many of those who don’t vote are very political and care very much. They just don’t see the point.

I have some sympathy with that view, because I have difficulty in understanding what it is we are supposed to be voting for. We had all of those wonderful candidates to choose from, but hardly a policy between them. Some of them have some good ideas, although many of them were straight out of the Daily Mail.

There were a number of very good individual candidates, but individuals don’t have the time or the resources to work through their ideas to see whether they really are worthwhile and could actually work and achieve something.

It was therefore not surprising that we had candidates at the hustings sitting on the fence, not able to commit themselves, because they knew they were not in possession of all the facts.

Of course, that didn’t stop some of them making promises that they are going to have great difficulty keeping.

It would have been far better to be faced with groups of candidates standing on policies which had been carefully researched and thought through. However, the Jersey way is to vote for someone you trust is going to get something done. I prefer to be a little more certain about what I’m getting when I cast my vote.

However, the main reason many people didn’t vote is because the political system is crazy. If those critics had fulfilled their democratic duty and cast their vote yesterday, they could have been considered hypocrites.

They have been complaining about the political system for years, so it would be strange for them to bolster the voting figures so that those who have failed to devise anything better can claim that the system is working.

They might even have helped to delay radical reform, which is what is needed.
So there is a danger that even a modest increase in turn-out could help to weaken the demand for electoral change, although it is encouraging to see so many candidates support the need for reform. This might just be electioneering for some, while for others it will be unachievable: they will no doubt find that there are more pressing priorities.

Indeed, it’s hard to argue against the view that economic prosperity, for example, is more important than electoral reform, in which case we’ll never get round to reform.

Although there appears to be an appetite for change, the problem is, as always, that there is little sign of consensus in those standing for election or those voting. Even those who say they support reform cannot agree on the size and composition of the States.

For example, there’s a widely held view that there are too many States Members. It is said that the UK with a population of 62 million only needs 650 Members of Parliament, whereas tiny Jersey with a population of 90,000 has 53 elected Members.

This argument ignores the nearly 800 people sitting in the House of Lords, as well as those sitting in the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland assemblies and the hundreds sitting in the 152 different types of local authority.

Personally, I don’t really care how many States Members there are. It can add to the length of debates, but then you can’t get too much of a good thing. In fact, it might even be a case of the more Members, the better. Those Members have to fill ministerial posts, which means wielding real power. Cut the number of Members and you reduce the available pool of talent.

In any case, the argument about Jersey having too many States Members is as ludicrous as claiming that the tiny Island has too many parishes. Now there’s a thought …

What does desperately need to be cut, however, is the number of different types of Member. It is simply crazy in a small Island to have three different categories of elected, or in some cases, unelected representative. They all have different constituencies, yet they all have only one vote. That results in unequal voting power for electors.

It also means that while a single election day for all three types of Member should have boosted the electoral turn-out, it also makes it ridiculously confusing, and I wonder how many spoilt papers there have been.

Those sections of the electorate that bother must also be suffering from a strong case of election overload. I didn’t have that problem because I live in Trinity, so I didn’t have the chore of voting for a Constable or a Deputy, even if I may have wanted the opportunity. That left me with only four Senatorial candidates I could vote for, whereas some in other parishes had the choice of four Senators, a Deputy and a Constable.

In theory I would therefore have more of a say in our democracy by living in St Mary, where relatively few voters have the power to elect a Deputy, a Constable and all the Senators. The electors of St Mary might even be close to holding the balance of power in our government.

It’s often said that Jersey is unique, and nowhere is this more so than in the way we choose our government. Whether we can actually be proud of this distinction is another matter. Perhaps the new intake of States Members will have more success in putting it right, but the failings in the system are going to make it very difficult for them to live up to their promises.

Peter Body is editor of Business Brief magazine