By-election watch: the score so far

It's three and a half weeks until the nominations meeting at the Town Hall to see which fine and friendly faces from the local community will be contesting the seat previously held by the late Richard Rondel, and, with today's rag giving us a short update on the folks that've put themselves forward, I thought I'd take stock and do a little who's who of who we've got so far.

First up, we've got established townie, Procureur du Bien Public, fluent Russian speaker, Jèrriais activist, winner of the 2007 and 2008 Fête Nouormande prizes for the best short story in Norman and mastermind of the St. Helier cycling strategy,  52-year-old Mr. Geraint Jennings. A former member of the Jersey Green Party (along with Stuart Syvret), Jennings has been trying without success to gain a seat in the States for the last 27 years, including at the last election in May. Running on a platform of "balance of healthy environment, strong economy, and everyday opportunity" most of his manifesto is that same recycled "population, environment, business" shtick that even the best candidates (which Geraint, in this case, very well might be) pack their manifestos with. I'm attracted to him, then, for two reasons.

Firstly, unlike far too many people, he actually takes Jèrriais seriously. He speaks Jèrriais, he's an active member of the Société Jersiaise and he writes in Jèrriais for both the rag and his own website. We live at a critical juncture in terms of Jèrriais policy - how seriously the government takes conservation in the next few years will make the difference between extinction and renaissance, and, for the sake of our cultural independence, renaissance MUST be the road we go down.

Secondly, he wants to devolve by-law powers to a reformed municipal administration in town. I bang on about this a lot, but giving parish administrations powers to actually do something meaningful (as opposed to what we have now, where in most parishes a small clique of grandees sitting around discussing potholes) is critical to reviving the parish system and giving a new lease of life to parish democracy - voting for people who take this stuff seriously is important.

So, that's Geraint. If you don't like Reform, or they don't put up a candidate, probably vote for him.

Next up is designated Shenton-Troy family sockpuppet, finance sector suck-up and incoherent moron, Gordon George Troy. He also stood in May in the senatorials, coming a resounding 13th place (just above Bernard Cribbins look-alike Frank Luce, greasy-spoon cafe owner Gino "put all employment laws into the dustbin" Risoli, and twin clowns Phil Maguire and Stevie Ocean) - a less than surprising result, considering his god-awful performance at the hustings. Troy's manifesto from May is Tel Boy-levels of incoherent and meaningless - either his writing skills are akin to a twelve-year-old or he viewed the voters with such contempt that he didn't bother to write anything substantial - and it's very clear from reading it that he comes from a much older breed of Jersey politician. It doesn't contain a single sentence of policy on economic diversification, child abuse, rents, or any other issue affecting Jersey today - Troy instead chooses to bang on about how amazing the finance industry is, and about his "30 year's (sic) business experience".

There's not really much more to say about Troy. He's self-evidently an out-of-touch idiot who wouldn't know a real political issue if it slapped him in the face and who has been put up to standing by Ben or whichever other particular made man of the Shenton-Troy mafia.

That brings us to the third man - or rather, woman - planning to contest the seat, and it's a name we haven't heard in the political sphere; Andrea Talibard-Mallet. Her only real claim to fame is bungling a chance to win £58,000 back when she was on the BBC version of "1 vs 100" in 2006. Given that her main agenda seems to be, er, copying off the dead ("The late Deputy Richard Rondel is such a great loss and his shoes are impossible to fill, but I am determined to see his vision for the regeneration of the district and St Helier come to fruition, as well as being a voice for the people of Jersey on so many issues that we face together."), I'm not exactly bowled over, but I guess we wait and see what she's got to offer. She can't be a complete idiot, right? Right?

Still, there's an elephant in the room.

Who is Reform Jersey planning on standing in St. Helier No. 3/4?

In May, they put up three candidates - Anne Southern, Mary Ayling-Philip and Julian Rogers, coming 7th, 8th and 9th respectively out of a ten-horse race. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but they'll likely be dealing with a smaller pool of candidates this time, and they've got the pick of the litter when it comes to deciding which one of their 18 candidates from last time round will be contesting the by-election. Reform's campaign suffered the last time around because the political right was able to construct a narrative of a bunch of hangers-on who only stood for Reform because they wanted support from a party - whether that's true or not, it's an image problem that Reform must avoid this time round. It's critical that the person put up to contest this thing is a principled socialist.

I guess we'll see in the coming weeks.

Saint Ouën's low-energy Connétable

Are you a disgruntled retiree looking for a well-paying seat to place your bum onto while you slowly glide towards your impending death?

Did you run an election campaign based entirely on selling yourself as a good person rather than someone with half-decent policies?

Have you found that your £46K/year salary isn't sufficient to prevent you from whining about it in the local rag?

Well then, the position of Connétable de Saint Ouën may be just what you've been looking for!

That's right, folks, our esteemed local Connétable is at it again, this time telling hacks that States members need a pay rise. According to Mr Buchanan, "If it [the Assembly] wants to attract people with real ability from the finance industry, then it has to realise those people are worth a certain amount of money." and, reassuringly, that he's finding his shiny new position to be "a lot more work than I expected". I always thought the reason these parish types sold themselves on their experience at the top of parish life (as Buchanan does extensively in his vote.je statement) was because they knew how it worked and how to handle the workload. Obviously, our Richie doesn't seem to have had the same experience!

After all, it's not like there's a big pay dispute going on at the moment, in which the States have repeatedly claimed that there's no more money left, is it? It's not like a senior member of the States Employment Board and the government as a whole making these sorts of comments could be seen as massively insensitive, right? Oh, yes, did I remind you that Connétable Buchanan is on the SEB, and an Assistant Chief Minister? 

To be fair, it's not like you'd know that from the way he conducts himself. According to Bob King of JCSA Prospect, "He’s talked about intense negotiations but he’s never been in them... I have only had one conversation with the guy, at my request, to say the whole thing is going to hell in a hand cart and here’s your chance to sort it out, and there was much hand-wringing from them".

Encouraging as ever, eh? We all know that the "negotiations" are a joke, a farce which involve the States representatives banging on about lack of money and little else, but you'd think the SOJ would at least pretend to try, right? Apparently not, especially when you're dealing with a man who, not even a year into his new job, declares that he'd rather be "having a rest" than serving the parish as Connétable. Obviously the Assembly is a bit too high-energy for Mr Buchanan. 

Don't you worry though, gris ventres; after all "It’s a challenge. I shall probably give up at the end of four years, exhausted and worn out". Stunning! Why bother with anything as ghastly as a potential challenge when you can be elected unopposed, trouser two hundred grand and split after four years, amirite?

I'll be honest, Richard, mate; it's not a great first year, and no amount of tasteless whinging to the rag about your salary is going to change that. Saint Ouën and the Assembly in general need vigour, energy, political aptitude - not a low-energy ex-finance drone whose selling points include "63 years of life experience".

The fight goes on.

Les jaunes câsaques?

France is on fire.

I'm sure we all know what's happening across the water. For five weeks, "yellow vest" protests have gripped France as decades of austerity, tax rises and attacks on workers boil over into blockades, demonstrations and violence on the streets. The French police, protectors of the French ruling class, have responded as police always do - with beatings, gas and armored personnel carriers bearing the flag of everyone's favourite industrial-financial cartel, the European Union. Still, the French aren't a people to take this sort of thing lying down, and every week they've been back on the streets - angrier, more prepared, and more demanding.

Of course, no self-respecting protest movement goes uncopied, and, since the middle of November, movements trying to catch onto the yellow vests movement have popped up in Italy, Bulgaria, the Benelux, Germany, and even as far off as Jordan and Iraq.

And, now, famed local nonce-catcher Cheyenne O'Conner has put together a Facebook group to encourage us Beans to get our jaunes câsaques (Jérriais for "yellow jackets") on and get out on the streets! In a post from the 15th of December, she writes:

"Time to get off our arses and start doing something about the issues we have on our island.

We are going to pick 5 big issues to protest. We will need one person standing for each issue.

This can be any relevant issue on the island, Rental prices, wages, childcare and so on.

If where going to make this big we have to do it properly, we have to discuss the problems and make this massive."

Well, lar-di-da, people in Jersey standing up to the ruling class! Not often we see that, now is it? 

Even if the involvement of local fascist Ciaran Gettens has got my alarm bells ringing (this time, my man's informing us of how "unwelcome" he feels if people speak Portuguese around him - you'd almost think he's a racist!), the poll O'Connor has set up to determine what the new movement's goals will be has turned up a few interesting results. Top, of course, is higher sentences for paedophiles - unsurprising on an island where paedos can get away with a couple of months in La Moye for plotting to groom a child - with some others being lower rents on social housing, a £10 an hour minimum wage, abolition of GST on essentials and a general legalisation of cannabis. 

They're no revolutionaries, our jaunes câsaques, but I find this whole thing pretty interesting nonetheless. £10/hr, abolition of GST on essentials, lower rents - these are all things we've all been pushing on for ages, but no-one's yet organised into a cohesive movement. O'Connor's jaunes câsaques have the potential to bring together a big section of Jersey society which austerity and Parkerism have left badly pissed off. As I write, the group on Facebook has 500+ members, and growing, with a couple of half-decent left voices taking their forms in Jan McAllister (the woman behind this), "Phil Example-Card" AKA Phil Renouf (local libertarian socialist, direct democracy activist and architect of a bright idea from a few years back to establish a "Jersey Pirate Party" as a part of the international pirate politics movement) and the man, the myth, the legend, John McNichol, a Reform Jersey candidate from May's election and a committed socialist and anti-imperialist. 

I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this.

Keep Nazi uniforms out of our bunkers

How very tasteful!

It's come to my attention in the last couple of days that a small bust-up has occurred in the last week within the fortress subcommittee (FSC) of the Channel Islands Occupation Society, and it's given me a bit of a wee cause for concern.

You might remember from a blogpost I wrote back in September, criticizing the increasingly common presence of Nazi swastikas graffitied onto the island's German bunkers, that I'm not such a fan of edgy neo-fascist symbology around our bunkers.

You may also be aware that last week's meeting of the Occupation Society's FSC recorded in their minutes a certain discussion, entitled:

"It was brought to the meeting under general conversation that the current rule with regards to uniforms being worn needs to be altered, potentially to be allowed with the main committees’ approval due to the number of living history / re-enactment groups we have visiting the societies various complexes, as the rue stands, we should be refusing entry to said groups / people which would, be very detrimental to the societies (sic) reputation as well as losing a fair amount of entrance fees"

Entrance fees! Of course! Who cares about neo-Nazis potentially latching onto this when there's money to be made?

You know, I'll say right here and now that this is just my two cents. I'm not involved with the Occupation Society or maintenance of these sites in general, so maybe there's something I'm not getting here. That said, I feel like it's going to be a lot more "detrimental to the societies (sic) reputation" to allow uniformed fascists to parade around our bunkers under the guise of re-enactment - as Jon Carter, head of Jersey Heritage once called the idea, it's "insensitive, tasteless and insulting to the victims of Nazi tyranny".

That's right, we've had this debate before, and the clowns in favour were pretty soundly rejected. Back in 2007, Insel Soldaten, a group of "re-enactors" led by infamous public twit and Moore Stevens trust officer Simon Dodkins, tried to convince us that letting people who enjoy dressing up as agents of ideological criminality and homicidal racism was A-OK. After a public consultation, in which a large amount of people came out violently against the idea, and the President of the Jersey Jewish Congregation said it would "give encouragement to those people who either deny the holocaust or perhaps more unfortunately tacitly support all or part of the aims thereof", this got followed up by a Special Branch investigation into potential links with off-island neo-Nazi groups. Sounds pretty sensitive, right? Not according to our Mr Dodkins, who, according to the local rag, claimed at the time that "he could not understand why opinion was divided within the Occupation Society as to whether dressing up as German soldiers was a good idea or not". 

Is Mr Dodkins thick, or simply deeply out of touch? I wouldn't dare presume exactly what sort of ideas in Mr Dodkins' head might've precipitated that sort of view, but suffice to say it feels a little worrying. 

I'm not sure why, after the previous pushers of this farce of an idea were investigated by national counter-terrorism police, the Occupation Society are working on this idea again. 

Who in the right mind thinks they're serving the public interest by pushing for this?

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.