Dirty deals with rogue regimes

"The 15 officers who arrived at the prison in southern Yemen hid their faces behind head dresses, but their accents were clearly foreign. They lined up the detainees and ordered them to undress and lie down. The officers then searched the anal cavity of each prisoner, claiming that they were looking for contraband mobile phones. The men screamed and wept. Those who resisted were threatened by barking dogs and beaten until they bled." - Al Jazeera, Yemeni prisoners say UAE officers sexually torture them: AP, 20th of July 2018

The United Arab Emirates is, as the saying goes, a small country with big ideas.

A regime accused by the UN of slaughtering thousands of civilians in airstrikes over Yemen, alleged by Qatar to be running a network of clandestine prisons for sexual and psychological torture, and under investigation by British police for arbitrary detention and torture of British nationals.

Secret foreign prisons where reports have found that "individuals endured rape at the hands of coalition forces and were subjected to electrocution in the genitals, chest and armpits" and "electric cables were used alongside wooden bats and steel poles during the interrogation sessions".

A justice system described by human rights lawyers as "a system which is abused by individuals in positions of power and a complete vacuum of accountability".

Systematic abuse of Asian domestic workers within a system repeatedly called "21st century slavery" or a "culture of slavery".

And, according to our esteemed External Relations minister, a government that are our new best mates!

Last week, our man in the Middle East, or indeed whichever other violently nasty dictatorship you require a friendly relationship with, returned from a trip to the fakest land on Earth, the UAE. I'm sure the independentista crowd were delighted to hear that from now on, Jersey is a big boy now and so we can be trusted to negotiate our own trade deals, independent of UK government say-so.

Who are our brand, shiny new first partners in international commerce? Why, a murderous absolute monarchy which executes queer people and backs al-Qaeda, of course!

I think it's safe to say that we've reached the point in the life of a tax haven where any sense of maintaining some sort of reasonable international reputation has gone completely out the window at this point.

Real talk here for a second.

Diplomacy is tough stuff, and it often involves sitting down and talking with people you neither agree with nor particularly like. Many regimes in the world may not share your values, and practically none share mine, but sitting down with people you don't share values with is part of building a more peaceful world. However, if it wasn't clear from the above, the UAE is not just your bog-standard authoritarian regime. They are a rabidly violent and extremely nasty supporter of international terrorism, an accomplice of Saudi Arabia in the mass murder of Yemenis - using British weapons - and an economy largely based on the effective slavery of millions of south Asian migrant workers, to the point where Emiratis are a small minority within their own country. They've faced serial condemnation from news outlets, international organisations and the UN for their conduct both at home and abroad, and have been involved in some of the worst torture operations since "extraordinary rendition" and "enhanced interrogation techniques".

Basically, these are some really nasty people.

It gets worse.

According to today's rag, it's been confirmed that our second trade deal as an independent negotiator will be with those paragons of virtue, the government of Rwanda. I've discussed Rwanda before on this blog, back when the Jersey Overseas Aid Commission - was getting all in a tizz during the row over Arsenal's links to the Rwandan government. You can read the original blog, "Jersey's support for the racist Rwandan dictatorship" - but by way of summary, Rwanda is a totalitarian ethnostate run on pre-1959, colonial lines, with members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group - including Paul Kagame and his former terrorist band turned governing party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front - filling up virtually all governmental positions and members of the majority Hutu ethnic group reduced to their former status as second-class citizens. It's also, surprise surprise, known for having a serious torture problem - Human Rights Watch, interviewing an ex-prisoner from Rwanda known as Ernest (not his real name) wrote "Ernest said that when he refused to confess, soldiers “brought a plastic bag and put it over my head and started to ask questions. After a few minutes, when they saw that I was suffocating, they stopped.” He said they suffocated him four more times until he defecated on himself. “I thought I was going to die,” Ernest told us."

Our wonderful new partners, everyone. Isn't globalisation great?

Now's Definitely Not The Time - Parker officially kills SOJ negotiations

Is Charlie Parker brave, arrogant or just plain stupid?

I suspect I'm not alone in that being the main question on my mind when I picked up my copy of the local rag this evening and saw that, far from backing down from his previous threats to impose his below-inflation pay offer onto States workers, Team Parker have (true to form) decided that they aren't so interested in such scarily socialist ideas as negotiation or compromise with organised labour and that civil servants, teachers and uniformed services will be having the deal unceremoniously shoved into their pay packets at the end of this month.

You know, the same deal that produced a near-unanimous vote for a strike at a union meeting less than a month ago. Big think.

This stuff really does write itself sometimes. I'm not quite sure Parker realises that we no longer live in the 19th century and that you can't just stick up a middle finger to organised labour anymore and expect to get away with it.

I've gotta admit, I'm sitting here at my computer, thinking real hard, but even with my neoliberal ghoul Very Serious Businessman™ hat on, I'm struggling to see what Parker's optics are here. He certainly isn't about to beat down what Prospect only this week described as a potential "general strike", and no amount of hushed whispering at the shrine of the Great She-Elephant or combative emails aimed at bullying States employees into submission are going to change that any time soon. Of course, this is Jersey, so it might be too much to assume that the ruling class actually have a strategy here, but Parker is no thicko - everything we ever hear from the inside suggests that he's well aware of his own personal unpopularity. So far, they've kept up the pursuit of their slightly pathetic attempt to turn SOJ employees against each other - this time favouring nurses, midwives and manual and energy workers, who are set to see a revised offer putting them all on the same percentage pay rise (and taking away the higher raises set for the lowest-paid staff) - but it hasn't worked so far and it won't work again. States employees aren't stupid and Parker's efforts to divide and conquer have so far proved pretty inadequate, especially for someone who is supposed to have experience with this kind of thing.

It'll be quite something to see exactly how the unions end up responding to this but I'm not exactly expecting Terry Renouf to be extending Parker an invitation for tea any time soon.

Meanwhile, while everyone else is being told that there's no money (Parker's favourite line which is, er, actually complete bollocks), the supposedly austere new policy of no new hirings announced by Connétable de St. Oüen Richard Buchanan on Monday isn't going to apply to hiring new spin doctors and other "essential" roles at the top of the States. I feel like I remind people of this a lot, but we've already spent over nine million quid on making sure that the assorted transition team gruppenführers making up Parker's oberkommando are living in sufficient luxury. That's quite enough, thanks Charlie.

If you can find money to hire another Dr. Goebbels, you can find money to pay your employees properly. 

Is a little bit of honesty really too much to ask?

The Sark Crisis - a constitutional precedent about to be set?

"Bad boys, bad boys whatcha gonna do? 
Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? 
Bad boys, bad boys whatcha gonna do? 
Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?" - Bob Marley, Bad Boys

Regular readers of the local rag will remember that about a fortnight ago, former senator, Establishment kingpin and anti-democratic criminal Philip Bailhache had a letter published in the paper which attacked comments made by Labour MP and tax haven-buster Margaret Hodge, where she accused Jersey of funneling "dirty money" and pressed the States to bring Jersey into line with transparency standards and make the Island's beneficial ownership register publicly accessible. I didn't write about this at the time, but recent goings-on in Sark have breathed some new life into the standard finance industry back and forth and made this a pretty interesting case to look at. Bailhache argues in his letter that to use crown powers or dictate legislation to Jersey would be "unconstitutional", and therefore that Hodge should butt out.

However, the political crisis on Sark in recent weeks seems to have cast a wee bit of a shadow over this standard defense of Jersey's outrageous financial law.

A bit of backstory. Eight years ago, in 2010, a UK select committee made an assessment, which at the time was agreed with by the UK government, that "just as the establishment of democratic government in Sark was a matter of good government, any threat to the ability of that system to operate fairly and robustly has the potential to raise good government issues which might require UK Government intervention". Last month, Sark's infamously undemocratic legislature, the Chief Pleas, failed to pass a budget. Following this, the island's Finance and Resources Committee resigned, as well as the island's one civil servant. As well as this, it has now been over six years since Sark had a contested election. Following this effective collapse of the island's government, the UK minister responsible for crown dependencies, Lord Richard "arse!" Keen, wrote a letter to the Chief Pleas, informing them that "I am aware that urgent measures have been implemented to manage the situation but it is nonetheless a serious state of affairs in which Sark now finds itself" and that "‘I therefore wish to have your assessment of the implications for the good government of the island", the implication being that Sark's political independence is on the chopping block if the Chief Pleas can't produce a functional government with a decent democratic mandate and an upsized professional civil service.

Considering that politicians in Sark aren't even paid and the island is in such a poor state that Sark Electricity are threatening to cut the electricity (which also means cutting the water, which means a public health emergency and the evacuation of the island en masse), personally I'm not exactly holding my breath.

So, what does this mean for Jersey?

The key question here, I suppose, is: could this also happen to Jersey?

Sark is a royal fief and part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, meaning it has an identical relationship to the UK to the one between the UK and Jersey. It follows on from this that, should the UK government be in the mood (and the possibility of a Corbyn government in the near future means that it's likely enough that they will be), Jersey's political independence could also be under threat if there was judged to have been a "breakdown in good government". Anyone who knows what happened to Stuart Syvret, knows of the serial and blatant corruption and intimidation engaged in by senior politicians and legal officials, knows of the total non-existence of the rule of law on this island. knows full well that if the UK government was so inclined they would have more than sufficient grounds under this "breakdown of good government" requirement to step in, start asking questions, and, ultimately, start dictating legislation.

So, the answer is: yes, this could absolutely happen to Jersey.

What are the gangsters running the island planning to do if London comes a'knocking? The evidence is there - the witnesses exist - the scandals and corruption are there for you to read about on public forums. Everyone knows it, and some people braver and cleverer than me are able to expose it in all its detailed and horrific glory. When the Brits step in, when this stuff is on the front pages of every newspaper in the country, when their buddies in the City hang them out to dry - what are they going to do?

To quote the esteemed Chief Executive of the States of Jersey: "There will be casualties".

And you probably aren't wrong in thinking that one Philip Bailhache will be chief among them.