No magic money tree?

"Your average person in Jersey looks upon the island's political system, particularly over the past two weeks, as a total sham.... we are ruled by a government that is totally incompetent." - Deputy Montfort Tadier, 2008

"And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”" - Luke 23:34

We are ruled by idiots. 

A simplistic conclusion, perhaps, but one I've found myself increasingly unable to not draw after the events of this week in the long-running saga over public sector pay.  

On Monday, it was announced by public sector unions that they're going back on strike. Customs and Immigration officers won't be turning up on Monday morning, followed by civil servants on Tuesday. Teaching assistants will be walking out for two-and-a-half hours on Monday morning, and civil servants have been ordered to stop accepting paid overtime. No more pussy-footing around with two-hour walk-outs. 

On Tuesday, both nursing unions voted to reject the States' final offer, a derisory below-inflation rise of 3%. Threatening industrial action, the unions said that "nursing staff have had enough of being devalued", "there will be no staff for this building if the concerns of nursing staff are not addressed" and "there needs to be recognition that this includes their staff, who, having been continuously undervalued, have experienced an ongoing detrimental impact on both morale and mental health.". 

Ouch. 

On Wednesday, our esteemed Chief Minister reacted to the news that another batch of public sector workers had told him and Charlie where they could stick it by tossing out everyone's favourite Prime Minister's election spiel, saying that there's "no magic money tree" and that a pay rise for nurses that met the cost of living would mean that taxes would have to go up. Oh, the horror! Functioning public services, what kind of nerds have those? We literally don't have a corporate tax rate - ultra-rich "high value residents" are paying 1% on most of their yearly earnings, while the working and middle classes get squeezed and squeezed forever. Gosh, it's almost like we live in a tax haven which requires comprehensive tax reform!

On Thursday, our wonderful Connétable de Saint Ouën, Richard Buchanan, unconvincingly claimed that the States Employment Board doesn't feel "any pressure" to appoint a new chair, nearly a month after Tracey Vallois finally cracked and resigned her post as the head of the SEB. Yeah, no need to worry, lads, I'm sure it'll all work out fine. It's not like the board is going through its toughest period EVER, or anything like that. Don't you worry. Everything is OK. We're doing fine. Ignorance is strength. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. 

Obviously, this sort of rank idiocy in the face of crisis hasn't been well-received even by the armchair overseers of the Corporate Services Scrutiny Panel, who have summoned the Chief Minister to a hearing in order to discuss why Richard Buchanan is such an intransigent moron why the board responsible for overseeing the most live issue on the island's political scene right now hasn't actually got anyone to chair it. 

Also on Thursday, our friends the States FOI team published a lovely response to a question on the rolling monthly cost of Parker's interim directors, which you can read here. Total monthly cost, plus expenses: £389,600 a month. A report released the day before informed us that, for example, Anthony McKeever, the interim director of Health and Community Services, is pocketing £27K a month. 

No magic money tree, right?

Who actually signs this stuff off? Who can we hold responsible for deciding that £27K was anything near a remotely reasonable monthly cost for one bloke? 

It's beginning to feel like the rolling incompetence, poor attitudes and general lack of serious from the States over the last few months in relation to the civil service problem is starting to come to a head. They don't have any options left. John le Fondré is many things, but stupid isn't one of them, so he must realise that he doesn't have a way out of this. The strikes will go ahead next week, and then they'll get worse, and then they'll get really, really bad, and then government on this island will effectively cease to function, because the unions aren't playing around anymore. The government has no cards left to play - the argument that "there's no more money" has long been exposed as a fraud, and the government's negotiations with union officials ground to a screeching halt the moment the government declared their pay offer final. 

So, what's the plan, lads? What's the grand strategy?

Cave in to all of the unions' demands? 

Screech about how there's no money left until the end of time?

Or simply bugger off back to Angliétèrre and trouser all the cash?

Can't exactly say I'm keen to find out. 

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?

Unions roll on industrial action while SEB plug their ears

"Hands up for industrial action"
Credit: JCSA Prospect

We're on a roll, folks!

It's been something of a strangeness in recent weeks and in the last two months that I've not really discussed the escalating public sector pay war between public sector unions and Charlie Parker's gang, escalating though it has definitely been, since I last covered it back in August. As we all know, since then, the climate at La Motte Street has gotten veeeeeeeery nice and tense as Parker's rhetoric has hardened, the unions have gotten more and more assertive, and the whole atmosphere among public-sector workers has turned poisonous as they're told that there's no money for a pay increase that actually meets inflation while The Bird and his sextet are on a thousand quid a day. Now, Der Kommandant von Jersey himself has taken a wee sojourn to Argentina, the workers are pissed, and, at a general meeting of hundreds of public sector employees on Thursday at the Radisson, industrial action received a ringing endorsement.

Whoops!

But wait.

It gets better.

Like I just said, our public-sector-sweeping boi is currently on a cheeky jaunt in the land of beautiful mountains, sweeping deserts and unreconstructed Nazis, Argentina. So, whose job was it to step in and uphold Parkerism? Deputy Chief Minister, minister for Education and chair of the States Employment Board, Senator Tracey Vallois, who, by some miracle, has been able to miss the point even more clearly than Parker has! She's taken to pointing out that "the vast majority of Jersey staff are paid better than their NHS colleagues" and "receive a healthy pension scheme to which the States contributes 16%".

Well, lar-di-da, Tracey. If that's the case, why on earth aren't staff flocking over to Jersey to fill our vacant jobs in healthcare, social care, or all the other giant gaps we have? Why aren't Frank the nurse from Croydon or Amelia the bone surgeon from Glamorgan queuing up for their new jobs in our wonderful healthcare system? I'd point it out, but Tracey does my job for me - "comparisons with the UK are difficult because of the varying costs of living".

So why bother making the point then? 

Jersey's healthcare staff are paid better than their NHS colleagues because living in Jersey is MORE EXPENSIVE. Our living wage is £10:20 an hour, the same as the London Living Wage (you know, the one from the city which is so expensive that over a quarter of its inhabitants live in poverty). Wages have been stagnant or declined in the island for two decades, living standards have dropped by 10% in seventeen years, while productivity and economic output in general have unsurprisingly dwindled. It doesn't exactly take an economics major to work out that comparisons to the UK are going to be useless, and she even says so. So why even make the point? Hell, why even respond in what looks like a deliberately patronising way? Is Tracey trying to wind them up? Doesn't seem like it - the letter is full of assurances of her concern. Does she not know that Jersey is far more expensive than the vast majority of the UK? Unlikely - you'd think someone able to get elected to one of the Island's most senior political posts would have at least an inkling about this kind of thing? Was her letter to the public sector employees the work of the office idiot on his lunch break? I'd like to hope the States were taking this even slightly seriously, but ever since their negotiators were too lazy to turn up to a meeting with union leaders, I've had serious doubts about even that.

You do wonder how they're planning on managing a strike when they can't even get a letter right.

One Government, Team Oligarchy

Another week, another consultant, another few millions down the drain, and another bout of patronising sloganeering.

In the latest episode of Kommandant Karl's quest for lebensraum on sunny Jersey, it's come out in a recent States announcement that actually, the five consultants comprising Parker's current hit squad (who as of the beginning of September have already cost the public purse over £9 million) aren't going to be enough to stomp out the remaining vestigial traces of democracy in Jersey create a "one government, Team Jersey" culture in the civil service, and that we're going to be bunging another £3.5 million the way of yet another gang of consultants to deliver the corporate-isation we apparently so desperately need.

Quote from the SOJ statement, "Team Jersey partner announced", dated 20th September 2018: "The first phase of the £3.5 million ‘Team Jersey’ initiative will see a group of ministers, stakeholders, islanders and employees working with TDP to co-design the programme."

"This will then be rolled out to all 7,500 employees to improve teamwork, collaboration and leadership capability, develop new ways of working, build a customer-focused approach, and help to embed the behaviours and values that underpin the new structure."

TDP refers to the TDP Group, a consultancy firm based in Halifax in west Yorkshire, and I can only assume that "stakeholders" refers to the crony capitalists in the financial sector. I can almost imagine the board room meetings between SOJ and TDP - "hey, guys, you know what politics in Jersey really needs? Even more disproportionate influence from the financial sector!".

Main question here - why have we been previously led to believe that Parker and the Gang of Four were going to transform the civil service themselves, and then suddenly this new group come onto the scene? For someone whose election manifesto included a commitment to "achieving greater value for money" in the public sector, John le Fondré seems like he's being way too easily taken for a ride.

It's not like this reform process is actually getting anywhere quickly, either. The civil service is practically in a state of anarchy - departments are shifting responsibilities, ministers aren't sure of their portfolios, Parker and co. are tossing more and more consultants and transformation programs into the ring and pouring gasoline onto a fast-building fire that seems sure to end with a major civil service strike and showdown between public sector unions and the state.

I had hoped before the election that if JLF ended up as Chief Minister, he'd be able to try and bring this gravy train to a screeching halt.

Seems he's perfectly happy to allow us to run right off the tracks instead.

Wage bill for Parker's team tops £9 million as fifth consultant joins the team

The grand old gravy train is rollin' down the tracks yet again at SOJ headquarters.

As the Gang of Five - now, I suppose, the Gang of Six - stumbles from scandal to scandal, it's come out that Ein Kompanieführer has decreed that the public will be footing the bill for another one of his pet sycophants.

So, who's our shiny, expensive newest consultant? A Mr. John Laverick, former corporate suit at, er, Carillion, the construction firm which collapsed earlier this year after racking up £7 billion in debts and is now under investigation by the Insolvency Service in the UK. Fresh from overseeing the biggest compulsory liquidation in British legal history, Laverick is now Parker's "chief information officer" - in English, the new head of IT. He's the latest addition to Parker's hit squad, now comprising four UK consultants being paid something between £1,200 and £1,400 a day. Yes, folks, you heard that right, over a thousand quid a day.

Or are they?

According to the rag's coverage, someone - presumably a disgruntled civil servant - has handed them new information suggesting that these ludicrous rates have actually gone up - their source has suggested that the bill for the Gang of Five has crept up to over £9 million in less than a year.

Parker and co. must be laughing all the way to the bank.

Fresh blow to Parker as civil service unions threaten strike action

Oh, Charlie... this just ain’t your month, is it?

Not 3 weeks after the hapless SOJ Chief Executive was revealed in a major scandal to have been granted full housing quallies as a condition of his employment, Charlie Parker has been humiliated once again as major civil service unions have not only rejected his latest pay offer, but have threatened to go on strike in order to get a better deal.

Since March, and as part of his grand plan to reform government in Jersey, Parker has been failing attempting to negotiate a series of two-year pay deals with unions representing States employees. Parker’s opening bid, despite an organisation-wide propaganda drive, roundly rejected by civil service unions and, since then, negotiations have been ongoing - apart from a short break in May, when SOJ negotiatiors tried to make a show of force by not bothering to show up to talks. The unions weren’t impressed.

Charlie’s latest offer is hardly much less of a piss-take than his opener, as far as civil servants are concerned - while manual workers would receive a 7.9% rise, doctors 7%, nurses and midwives 6.6% and teachers and uniformed services 6.1%, civil servants are being asked to suck up a 4.1% rise. For civil servants, more than half of their deal is made up of non-consolidated payments - essentially a one-off payment that adds nothing to their actual salary or pension. Once again, public sector unions aren’t impressed. Their response? The deal “isn’t worth the paper it’s written upon” and that they’re now seriously considering going on strike. Jersey Civil Servants Association chairman Terry Renouf, spokesperson for both Prospect and the JCSA, wasn’t having any of it, slamming Parker’s offer as a “very damaging approach” and saying it “represents a further degradation of the standard of living for our members and their families on top of the recent years where below cost of living awards have been made. The offer does nothing to counter the already low morale amongst civil service staff, who continue to receive a lack of respect from their employer. No one has a problem with doctors, nurses and so on getting paid more but not at the expense of other pay groups. Non-consolidated cash payments are not worth the paper they are written on – they are non-pensionable and not added to base salary. At the end of the day, there is only a certain amount of goodwill in the pot, and now I’m afraid to say that it has drained away. This is very disappointing for our current members, and it is going to discourage people from coming to work here because they will be able to see quite clearly that the States of Jersey is not a good employer.”.

“We will ballot our members on the current offer with a recommendation to reject and are considering an industrial action ballot if the offer is rejected.”

Yikes. I hope Parker realises that the PR battle a strike would necessarily involve isn’t something he’s got a chance in hell of winning. Both among his own staff and among the public, Parker is about as popular as plague, especially after the recent quallies fiasco. The gravy train him and his interim directors are widely perceived to be riding isn’t a great look, to say the least, and this escalation is hardly going to help matters. Civil servants shouldn’t be expected to lie down and take it - Parker’s intransigence is what has escalated things this far.

Let’s hope he doesn’t escalate further.

Top officials in disarray as questions raised over Parker's quallies

States communications director Stephen Hardwick's struggle to decide whether Charlie Parker was or wasn't granted quallies by the previous government continues.

Following the allegations by the local rag on Friday that SOJ Chief Executive Charlie Parker was granted "entitled" (full) housing status by the previous Gorst administration, and handling the scandal with all the tact of your average Great Plains buffalo, Hardwick immediately denied that the paper had any case to answer. According to him, no States employee had been granted quallies, full stop. Today, wheeling round on his previous argument, Hardwick said he had "made a mistake". The rag then asked him why, if he did actually know about this decision, why news of the decision was kept on the downlow until local hacks took to expose it. Hardwick's response? He didn't give one. Forgive me, Stevie, but maybe your "30 years’ experience in corporates, government, politics and consultancy" and "strong values to do the right thing well" don't actually count for diddly squat if you can't get the housing status of your own boss correct, when your whole job is streamlining communications between the States and the public.

Meanwhile, our esteemed elected (well, some of them anyway) representatives in the Assembly haven't proved much help either. While Chief Minister John le Fondré is, er, on holiday, his assistant, Chris Taylor, has admitted that he doesn't actually have any idea whether Parker was offered or demanded his quallies as a condition of employment - despite that, er, literally being his job. Saying that, the Corporate Services Scrutiny Panel have at least stepped in to condemn the blatant corrupt nature of the deal the Gorst regime made with Charlie Parker - in their statement, they "recommend that tougher rules are put in place so that decisions of this nature are not made again", commenting that "while we appreciate the importance of this particular role, five years’ “satisfactory service” is a vague term that could ensure even the most mediocre performance gains a retirement with considerable tax advantages". Chaired as it is by senior backbencher and recently positioned critic of the new government, Senator Kristina Moore, it probably wouldn't be overly cynical to say that she's using this recent scandal as an opportunity to go into attack mode, but the fact that the scrutiny panel is even willing to condemn this in the terms they have is something to celebrate.

Perhaps the best attempt at deflection so far came from an unidentified spokesperson for the States who spoke to the rag - as he told it, "the decision was published on the government website, as are all ministerial decisions, and was therefore available for Islanders, States Members and others to view". Oh, so that's alright then! See, I don't know about you, but I have better things to do with my life than meticulously combing gov.je every day on the lookout for dodgy ministerial decisions - the fact that it was published on the infamously difficult to navigate, chaotically organised and stuffed full of legalese government website is no excuse whatsoever. The reason we're paying £100K annual salaries to overpriced English consultants like Stephen Hardwick is supposedly because they're going to revolutionise communication between the public and the government - hiding dirty backroom deals behind flimsy deflections asking you to sift through the gov.je crapfest doesn't exactly sound like a good start.

Eine insel, eine reigierung, eine zukunft!

Charlie gets his quallies?

The SOJ gravy train continues, full steam ahead.

According to a report in today's rag (July 27th), our old friend, SOJ Chief Executive Charlie "my way or the highway" Parker, was given full "entitled" residential status by the previous government as a condition of his contract before he took up residence in Jersey. Because apparently, a £250,000 yearly salary and practically dictatorial control over government departments wasn't enough!

"How did this happen?" you ask. "I thought you had to live in the island for ten years to get your quallies!". Ordinarily, that's the way things work - if you've only lived in Jersey for seven months, like Parker, you'd only qualify for "registered" status, the lowest status. Since Parker is a senior civil servant, ordinarily he would be given "licensed" status - better than "registered", but still with a whole host of restrictions. Crucially, "licensed" status goes hand in hand with remaining an "essential employee" - if you get sacked or leave your job, you're back to square one. However - and I didn't know this until today - a sub-clause in the law that established these categories allows the government to grant quallies to individuals in "exceptional circumstances". What "exceptional circumstances" were used to justify treating someone who at the end of the day is just another civil servant to a status everyone else has to either be born into or earn - and then keeping this whole thing on the down-low until local hacks exposed it? According to former senator and ex-Assistant Chief Minister Paul Routier's report on the case, it was the "quality of Mr Parker as a candidate" and the "consistency of his track record in delivering change" that convinced the previous government to bend to Parker's demand for quallies - apparently, the massive insult that would send to the thousands of hardworking islanders without quallies, or the fact that Parker was already set to be paid hundreds of thousands every year, or just the oversized ego that demanding something as coveted as quallies, the moment he stepped off the boat, shows, weren't considered.

Who on earth does he think he is?

Ignoring the fact that Parker has so far been a decidedly low-quality, ineffective Chief Executive, failing repeatedly in his attempts to face down public sector unions, the fact that Parker made those sorts of demands - and the fact that the government bent to them - is frankly outrageous and insulting. Whatever yarn Parker's spokesmen spin about Parker "being here for the long term" and his "commitment" to disempowering our elected representatives and trashing the civil service "delivering a modern, one-government public service", any idiot can see Parker's real motivations for demanding quallies. As we all know, Jersey is a tax haven. Residency here comes with a much lower tax rate than in the UK, so if you're able to move your pension to the Channel Islands, you get to keep a lot more of the cash - at the expense of the UK taxpayer, obviously. Armed with his quallies, not only can Parker buy, sell and lease any property, but will also have full residency here in Jersey forever, tax benefits and all. Parker is 57, and given the sort of salaries he's been living on, both in his previous jobs and in this one, we can assume he's a very rich man - retirement is only a decade away. Once Parker has finished his crusade against the last vestiges of democracy Jersey has left "silo mentality" and "disjointed government", he'll be able to quietly retire here, and the UK taxman can kiss goodbye to ever getting anything back from him. Even better, the details of this cosy little deal were never actually revealed to the public, which is why we're finding out via the front page of the JEP, several months after the deal was closed. Trebles all round! Transparency in government? My arse.

I've commented before on how repulsive I find the gravy train that the States' top managers have all jumped on. It's not just Parker - his four pet sycophants (Stephen "oh yeah!" Hardwick, Jacquie McGeachie, Camilla Black and Anna Daroy) have been treated perhaps even more outrageously well than Parker. While Black and Daroy remain in consultancy positions earning £1300+ a day, Hardwick and McGeachie are in official positions earning significantly upwards of £100K/year (their salaries haven't yet been publicly revealed, but since they're set to appear in the SOJ 2018 accounts published next year, we know they're on upwards of £100K). Are this lot really worth it? Was no-one local good enough? Why on earth do we need to pay anyone such a ridiculous sum?

It's sickening, and this current story makes it all the more. Whatever inflated view of himself he has, Parker is supposed to be a public servant, not a robber baron. The gravy train shows no signs of slowing, and none of us know where it ends.

Is this really the kind of civil service we want?

States once again show contempt for civil service

Bully boy tactics abound once again at the top of SOJ management.

In a move clearly meant to send a message of "we're running the show here", States representatives decided that they couldn't be arsed to show up for a meeting last week with public sector union Staffside. According to Prospect, Staffside's representatives were left waiting for three-quarters of an hour for States representatives to arrive, after which they saw that no-one was showing up and left.

These negotiations come at a critical time, both for employees and management of SOJ. Despite an organisation-wide propaganda drive, Charlie Parker's utterly derisory "workforce modernsation" offer to put all States employees on one pay scheme with only ten bands was humiliatingly withdrawn after being rejected by major public sector unions in February. Since then, negotiations have been ongoing between said unions and the employer, apparently, given this latest show of force by SOJ, to not much success - Terry Renouf, chairman of Staffside and Prospect's Jersey branch, called this "a clear indication to Staffside that once again the Employer is not sincere about wanting to negotiate with staff representatives in line with agreed timescales".

This isn't the first clear indication of an insincere attitude that workforce modernisation has produced either. While Parker's restructuring program has had senior bureaucrats, often with years or even decades of experience, having to re-apply for their jobs, a "trebles all round" attitude has taken hold in head office, with two of Parker's pet sycophants "expert consultants" earning up to £1,300 a day and the other two on £100,000+ a year contracts, approximately three times the average Jersey salary. Helier Clement of the JEP slammed this gravy train in a column a few weeks back - he said that "this lot have not only hopped aboard (the gravy train) but appear also to have struck oil or discovered gold in the bowels of Cyril le Marquand House". I couldn't have put it better myself - especially coming at a time when living standards are slipping and inequality on the rise.

(Incidentally, is anyone else sick of being referred to by Parker as a "customer" or watching him lecture the bureaucracy on "customer services"? This isn't some mega-corporate state, Parker. We aren't the States' customers - we're the owners, something SOJ top management would do well to remember).

Gorst's grab for personal power

Charlie Parker's efforts to integrate his team of foreign consultants into the States apparatus and consolidate his and the Chief Minister's own power rumble on.

Yesterday, Parker announced that his gang of four - Anna Daroy, Stephen Hardwick, Jacquie McGeachie and Camilla Black - that made up the so-called "transition team" brought in to review the running of the civil service, having already cost the taxpayer £432K, will all be retained and be given permanent positions within the government apparatus. According to Parker, his four pets will be retained to support the delivery of "specific initiatives" - the details of which are unknown, effectively making them a permanent part of the States structure for the foreseeable future.

This comes only a week after the States (narrowly) approved the Chief Minister's grand plan for government reform - it will allow the Chief Minister to hire, fire and reshuffle ministers at will, move budgets between departments of his own accord, forms a single legal entity called the 'Jersey Ministers' under the personal control of the Chief Minister, and, most importantly, puts all States departments under the central direction of the Chief Executive - a person appointed by the Chief Minister. Given the amount of power being concentrated in the hands of a e structure of the government at will, bypassing such inefficiencies as scrutiny or public debate. Parker will be responsible for centrally directing all States departments in the way individual ministers do at present, and for ensuring that States money is spent "in an efficient way" - no word on how this will be defined, or what Parker's punishment will be if he should fail, and given that his position is by appointment, there will be no way for the public to hold him accountable.

With this additional announcement that Parker's people will be retained as a permanent part of the government structure, Parker - and by extension, the Chief Minister - are consolidating their own power and ensuring that even more of the government remains under their personal direction.

We've seen consolidation of personal power before - the introduction of the ministerial system of government in 2005 took power away from States members as a whole and vested it in the hands of a few - but at least under that system - the current system - ministers can be booted out at an election if the public judges them to have failed in their duties. The public has no way of getting rid of Parker or any future Chief Executive - he can't be voted out, his position isn't dependent on public approval of any kind. He serves at the pleasure of the Chief Minister, and as such is little more than an extension of their power. His new powers are little more than the Chief Minister taking direct control over all sections of government, except that should the Chief Minister make a serious mistake Parker is there as a fall guy.

The continued consolidation of power in the hands of the Chief Minister is possibly the most dangerous development in Jersey's political system since the introduction of ministerial government. Our government is and should always be the States of Jersey, not the all-powerful Chief Minister and his appointed lackey in the Chief Executive role. The problems within the civil service require a shift in organisational culture - handing off more and more powers to the Chief Minister will not solve the problem.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. This is nothing more than a personal power grab, Gorst and Parker trying to grow their own power. In pursuing it, both have shown their utter contempt for democracy.