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.

Gun certificates to become more expensive?

Ever tried to buy a gun in Jersey?

It's a long, boring, and onerous process. It requires filling in a long application form, which must be collected from and returned to your parish hall, by hand. It requires three photos of yourself to hand in to the cops, as well as two separate forms from two "referees" who have lived in the Island for at least two years. It also demands that you pay £45 for the parish to process your application - which can be refused - and if you've been in jail for more than three years (a sentence you can potentially pick up for selling a bit of weed to your mates), you're banned from possessing any type of firearm for the rest of your life.

You've also got to repeat this process every five years.

You'd think this was restrictive enough on an island where serious violent crime is practically non-existent and 10,000 guns are in the hands of private citizens without any real incidents for decades.

Sadly, our gun-grabbing politicians aren't so convinced. I'd hoped that after Deidre "I don't know" Mezbourian, the former Assistant Home Affairs minister who promised to tighten restrictions earlier this year, was left to gather dust at the head of the Comité des Connétables, gun owners would get a bit of a break. Or so I thought, because this week, Simon Crowcroft, local poet, mediocre dramatist and sometime Connétable de St. Hélyi, has demanded that prospective gun owners or people looking to re-apply for their license stump up more cash.

It seems shit by any name really does smell the same.

Crowcroft's rationale here is cloaked in the thinnest of thin excuses. According to the good Connétable, his own parish - St. Helier - is having to process so many licences that, unlike any other parish, he has to hire a part-time firearms officer to deal with the number of applications, which is making the costs involved in processing said applications too high.

A quick look at an FOI request from 2017 reveals this to be absolute bollocks and less of an indication of problems in the system so much as a problem of Crowcroft's honorary police being a bit useless. According to "Firearm Ownership (FOI)", issued 28th of September 2017, St. Helier currently has 180 active firearms certificates. By contrast, St. Brélades has 175 and St. Ouen has 153. It's worth a reminder at this point that these certificates are only issued once every five years.

The problem here is that St. Helier's honoraries aren't able to do the same job that their counterparts in Brélades or over here in good old St Ouën and require the service of a part-time firearms officer. Yet, Crowcroft's solution seems to be that, instead of just using his honorary police correctly, he wants to bump up the cost of people's firearms certificates depending on how many weapons they possess, the result being that competition shooters and suchlike get penalised for happening to own a larger collection of sporting equipment than someone who isn't so experienced. Crowcroft has also indicated that he'd be interested in raising the cost of certificates in general. Guns are only for rich people, amirite?

The parish should not be penalising gun owners because Simon Crowcroft cannot manage his system properly.

Perhaps he should stick to poetry instead.

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.

The true face of JLF - £30 million in cuts to come

Come on, folks, do it with me - 1, 2, 3, sigh.

You know, when the States elected a religious-right former Ernst and Young accountant with a manifesto so thin that the only real substance included in it was support for Thatcherite "low, broad and simple" tax reform, some of us did say that good ol' Johnny Boy was hardly about to represent a radical break from the austere and uncaring status quo that dominates Jersey politics.

I'm still not sure that many of us expected the utterly unnecessary and ideologically-driven cutbacks that were announced yesterday.

In a speech to the den of thieves known as Chamber of Commerce at a lunch event on Wednesday, our esteemed new Chief Minister announced that he's going to be finding £30 million of savings in his budget for the next year. Guess who's going to be copping it?

That's right, the very States workers whose unions have for months been threatening a strike over pay. As part of le Fondré's efficiency drive, there's going to be a "permanent reduction" in States staff.

Nice one, John!

The reasoning behind this is based in the most recent Medium Term Financial Plan, the savage programme of cuts that axed over £8 million in income support payments to the most vulnerable (low-income families, pensioners and the disabled), included additional charges, like the commercial waste charge, that the States subsequently voted down due to the standard projections of a jobs apocalypse from capitalist blood-suckers members of the business community. Thus, JLF has decided to go to ground and make sure that, instead of new charges falling on his rich mates, over-worked and under-paid States workers are going to bear the cost of government failure.

Meanwhile, executives in States-owned arm's-length companies are stuffing their faces, the Parker gang are on a thousand pounds a day, and the gravy train launched by Gorst and co. is going full steam ahead.

There's been a lot of paternalistic bollocks made in the last couple of months about how the le Fondré government supposedly represents a more compassionate kind of governance, committed to the welfare of islanders, blah blah blah.

Doesn't take a genius to work out whose interests they really serve.

Arms-length fat cats stuff their pockets as staff tighten their belts

I'd usually hesitate to call the origin of this week's States management scandal a "tough question", given that I think almost anyone could've seen this a mile off, but it seems our public sector boi Rob Ward is back at it again, and, as unsurprising as it is, his latest question in the Assembly has given the gorging slugs at the top of the semi-privatised dumps known as "arm's length companies" some uncomfortable reading.

Courtesy of the Wicked Witch's response to a written question from Deputy Ward, it's come out that while staff at JT, Jersey Post, the JDC, Andium and Ports of Jersey - all semi-privatised States companies run in the business-like style that neoliberal ghouls crave so desperately - have received pay rises that were below inflation (and thus below the rise in the cost of living, which, as we all know, is hardly showing any signs of slowing), while the executives at the top of these failed experiments in pseudo-privatisation have received fat pay increases.

Among the fat cats named in the rag's reporting (which I'll add is five days after the question was actually answered, showing how badly we need comprehensive independent media to cover things that actually matter instead of the bass ban or toucan crossings) were Ian Gallichan, chief exec of "social" housing monopoly Andium homes (the same Andium homes that'll charge you rents equivalent to 90% of those you'd be paying in the private sector) had his salary whacked up by 26%, from £150K in 2016 to £189K in 2017. His finance director, John Hamon, got his salary bumped by more than £20K, from £120K in 2016 to £141K in 2017. Meanwhile, terminally ill sufferers of Huntington's are waiting three years on highest priority for an Andium home and for every affordable home in Andium's supply there are on average 30 applications as house prices soar. Andium's response? Andium chairman, former Establishment caudillo and PR man for Haut de la Garenne nonces extraordinaire, Frank Walker, defended the pay rises by claiming they're just a one-off. Oh, so that's alright then. As for Andium's employees, they, er, didn't get a pay rise in 2016. At all. Walker threw them a bone in 2017, with a 2% pay rise - the only problem being that their wages had still fallen in real terms, given that inflation that year stood at 3.6%.

Meanwhile, JDC non-executive directors Ann Santry and Paul Masterson saw their pay packets jump from £15K to £20K and Graeme Millar, head honcho at the unfit-for-purpose JT was bumped from £346K to £363K, a rise of 5%, while his staff had to get by on a 1% rise in 2016 and a 1.7% rise in 2017.

I don't think I've seen a story this year that better encapsulates the phrase "well, imagine my shock". Given the gangland-scale bungs of cash being tossed the way of the Gang of Five in their crusade against public sector workers, housing norms and retrograde, silo-mentality vestiges like democracy, the fact that staff in these companies are getting summarily screwed while the folks at the top fill their boots just isn't surprising, at all. It's a depressing sign of the times when stuff like this becomes boringly ordinary, almost normal. Remind me again why JT, Andium, Ports et cetera exist? Remind me again how fully socialised and democratically controlled versions of these existing organisations couldn't do a far better job? Remind me again why running public services as a business is anything less than a completely insane idea?

The fact that the pockets of our valuable public services staff are being plundered to enrich the lard-arses in management is honestly disgusting. It really is high time this pointless experiment was summarily bopped on the head and fully socialised.