The Minister of Social Insecurity

Susie Pinel, bane of the unemployed, single mothers, and more generally anyone who has had to interact with the social security system, has announced her intention to stand for reelection, and what's more, she wants to keep the role of Social Security minister! Describing her role as "much-valued", she said she was "proud to be Minister for Social Security".

Pinel's record is essentially described as "la petite Iain Duncan Smith" - a minister given responsibility for social security who then proceeds to, er, do nothing but damage to the social security system. As the author of the brutal cuts of the 2016-19 Medium Term Financial Plan (MTFP), it was her who laid the groundwork for the austerity campaign that has caused so much damage to the lives of those dependent on social security. She has consistently voted against propositions for her own department to improve people's lives, voting against proposals to raise the minimum wage, as well as voting not once but twice to make single parents £40 worse off (despite the fact that over half of them live in relative poverty). Her opposition to the January 2018 proposal to restore the benefit was apparently because it "isn't fair to offer extra help only to single parents" and that the scrutiny panel that had recommended the benefit be restored (Health and Social Security) had "failed to fully understand the social security system" - given that it was her own government that proposed this cut originally back in the MTFP, these excuses ring hollow. 

Parental rights is another critical Social Security issue, and one where Pinel saw herself far outpaced by the Chamber's left. While Pinel indicated that she might not even accept all the recommendations of the Employment Forum's report (the document that precipitated the most recent public debate on parental rights), Deputies Mézec and Southern brought forward radical proposals to increase parental leave from 18 to 26 weeks, as well as accepting the EF's recommendations. 

Her cuts come against a backdrop where they couldn't be more harmful. An Evening Post report in 2015 found that from 2010-15, Jersey's poorest households had become 30% worse off (https://jerseyeveningpost.com/news/2015/11/17/reform-jersey-plan-campaign-to-oust-deputy/). A more recent report based off of numbers from the States Statistics Unit found that over the last decade, the Island's economic standard of living has declined by a sixth. When poverty is on the rise, benefits cuts are the last thing that's needed - this is just another case of right-wing politicians preferring balancing the books over improving people's lives. 

Given that it's two months to an election, you might expect Pinel to be bending over backwards to try and win votes as most politicians are doing. Not this one, apparently - our Susie has stuck hard and fast to her austerity agenda, voting against Mézec proposals to raise the minimum wage and to restore the single parent benefit even as many of the Members who backed her in 2015 flocked to Mézec's side. Reform Jersey identified her seat as a target as early as 2015, meaning that the campaign to oust her will take special priority when the election campaign kicks off. 

My advice to the minister is pretty simple.

Be scared.