By-election watch: Nominations night

That's right, folks, it's the 29th of January, 2019, and it's nominations day for the town by-election that's set to fill the seat previously held by the dearly departed Richard Rondel.

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.

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. 

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?