In the time since my last by-election post, the number of candidates has jumped from three to nine. We've got some arrogant no-hopers, some semi-decent progressives, and an accomplice to occupation and cultural genocide. Let's take a look.
First off, we've got the three who were first to announce, who I covered in my previous post - Geraint Jennings, Andrea Mallett and Gordon Troy. Jennings is a Jèrriais activist and progressive vote-splitter, Mallett is a fairly harmless-looking festival organiser, and Troy is a standard, Shenton-Troy family, out-of-touch relic of the 1980s, when all you had to do to get rich in Jersey was take a job in a local bank and help hide the stolen hordes of African despots and international terrorists. Jennings and Troy have both ran and lost before - none of the three have a substantial chance of winning the seat. There's not much more to say on those three: if you're interested, you can check out a previous post which dealt with this lot in detail here.
Next up is the guy that local "cynical old man" act and Blairite agitator Andy Jones likes to refer to as "one half of JAG" - John Baker, the chairman of the principles-free pseudo-libertarian gang known as the Jersey Action Group. Having established a reputation for loud and incessant complaining at the Future Hospital project's community outreach sessions and aligned himself with such steadfast allies as former deputy and erstwhile night thief Sean Power, Baker has now decided to throw his hat into the ring and run for deputy, and there's a disturbingly high chance he'll end up getting it. I might disagree with Baker on a whole host of issues, but he isn't stupid, and him and Power have, via JAG, built up a fairly substantial movement of hospital obsessives, Jersey Lifeboat Association fellow travelers and whoever they can pick up with a fairly generic anti-Parker, "anti-establishment" (at least, that's how they see it) line. Jersey has a fairly heavy constituency of cranks, and an corresponding community of "bloke you could have a beer with" conmen - Baker is, for better or for worse, the latest manifestation thus.
Number five, and we've got disability campaigner Anthony Lewis. On the face of it, he seems like a nice bloke about whom there isn't much to say, and, before I looked into his manifesto, I really didn't have much of a frame of reference as to what he really stands for. It's less generic than I expected. His manifesto from May last year, when he stood for senator, supports the creation of a Minister for Equality, an Environment Department completely separated from Planning, investment in recycling, electric public transport, cycle paths and a requirement for all newly constructed homes to have solar panels. It goes without saying that he is but one guy, with no party or other political structure behind him to back him up and help him achieve all this, and he's certainly no revolutionary, but he's a man with the right spirit, and that's something I can respect.
Next on the list is business consultant and "executive coach" Inna Gardiner.
Hoo boy.
Gardiner is a former employee of the Israeli Ministry of Education in the occupied city of Jerusalem. Any leftist worth their salt should know that the entire Israeli state apparatus is a settler-colonial death machine which works tirelessly to systematically enslave, oppress and ultimately expel or exterminate the Palestinian people, and the Ministry of Education is no different. Schools in Israel's Palestinian bantustan (the Palestinian National Authority) are woefully underfunded, and so, never one to pass up an opportunity to extinguish Palestinian culture, the Ministry of Education offers Palestinian schools extra money out of Israel's education budget if they agree to teach the Israeli school curriculum. Faced with god-awful funding from the puppet government in Ramallah and young Palestinian school leavers who can't find employment in the Israeli jobs market (80% of Jerusalemite Palestinians live below the poverty line and only 40% are employed), schools sign on, leading to a bizarre and tragic situation where Palestinian teachers are teaching Palestinian kids to view the genocidal mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from the land of Palestine during the Zionist invasion of 1948 as a valiant independence war for a haven for the much-persecuted Jews and Palestinian teenagers are doing exams on Israel's founding fathers and the history of Zionism. A culture that doesn't know its own history doesn't last very long - this policy, among many others, is simply one facet of the countless policies deployed by the Israeli government to grind down and destroy the Palestinian people.
Anyone who thought it was remotely acceptable to even engage with an organization and a government which engages in this kind of blatantly genocidal policy is deserving of far more than simply not receiving your vote. I'd advise anyone who even pretends to care about human rights and cultural preservation to refuse to touch her with a ten-foot pole.
Speaking of which, Nick le Cornu is standing again!
I genuinely admire Nick, and respect him for the consistent fighting for the rights of workers and for democratic reform that he's done over the past few decades. He's a committed socialist, the most radical of all the candidates, and he's regularly victimised by the state media and by the establishment-controlled courts because he asks all the right questions and doesn't give up easily. I've got no doubt that he'd be an absolutely class States member, and I'd love to actually endorse him.
However, he's also the candidate with the most established baggage, to the extent that it makes him kinda hard to support. Most people who know the name Nick le Cornu will be aware of the "Kristina Moore incident", a 2014 spat which saw NLC expelled from Reform Jersey after he accused Moore, the island's most popular politician in terms of number of votes, of faking cancer. Obviously, not a fantastic look, and NLC's decision to double down on it and claim he only lost the subsequent election due to a black hat establishment campaign to destroy his public image didn't make things much better. Obviously, he WAS the subject of a state media smear campaign - all progressive candidates are in Jersey - but that doesn't wash away the fact that he, to this day, refuses to really accept that accusing a cancer survivor of faking it wasn't very nice. The fact that, ever since the incident, he's been too proud to admit his errors and self-criticise makes him a pretty difficult candidate.
That said, nobody should ever be solely judged on one incident alone. Nick is a consistent anti-corruption, anti-oligarchy, anti-establishment campaigner who has fought for ordinary people for years and been treated like shit for it. If Reform Jersey aren't your bag, I'd say that le Cornu is your best bet.
Which, of course, brings us to Reform Jersey's candidate, Lyndsay Feltham. Full disclosure - I'd never heard of her before her candidacy was announced. From Reform's official communiques, she went to Le Rocquier and Hautlieu, she has a masters in Cultural and Media Studies, she's one of the few candidates who actually lives in the district and she's worked as a civil servant for 12 years, in Jersey and in Western Australia. I don't know her, and I can't vouch for either personality or principles, but, in Feltham's case, that isn't the point. The main thing which separates Lyndsay Feltham from every other candidate standing in this by-election is the fact that behind her is a political party, with a detailed 40-page manifesto, five members already in the States Assembly and a capacity to deliver which far outstrips any independent politician you care to name, and, at the end of the day, that's where this really matters. I like Geraint's consistent stand for the preservation of Jèrriais, I like NLC's commitment to a real socialist alternative, I like Ant Lewis' stauch environmentalism, but, when all is said and done, it's an indisputable fact that independent politicians with bright ideas don't tend to achieve much in the States, and usually end up either ground down and co-opted by the establishment or as a lone voice piping up from the back to speak to an establishment-dominated Assembly that doesn't take you seriously (that's you, Higgins). Anyone who reads this blog often will know full well that social democracy is hardly my cup of tea, but the revolutionary situation in these isles is hardly red-hot right now, and Reform are the only group who really have any capacity to change people's lives for the better.
With all that said, I can't exactly say I'm particularly hopeful for this by-election. With three broadly progressive candidates, and a host of others, it seems like the progressive vote will, as ever, be sliced and diced between three candidates, causing them all to fail and yet another reactionary voice to find their place on the Assembly's benches. Another day in the depressing meat grinder that is left-wing politics in Jersey, eh?
Time'll tell, I guess.
