Where are the Mumbles....?

They are back - the silly season is here again - but mirror, mirror on the wall - who is the silliest of them all?

Of course I mean that Scrutiny returned to the Jersey political scene today.after a lay-off for months and months.

Two Panels were convened today but they seemed to share the same single dominating thought -  the Jersey population is aging and we don't know how to support it....

The Mumbles were there too in abundance....
Deputy Renouf  Chair of H & SS Scrutiny Panel the newly elected softly spoken lawyer from St Ouen started the ball rolling (it was a very soft ball) and politely suggested that it might be useful for everybody to introduce themselves.

So the 13 ( 5 being females) sat around the top  table did just that...Senator Green the New Minister for Health had 6 supporters to help him (just as Deputy Pryke usually did in her day) who all had mumble as a first or second name and there were several more on Renouf's Panel too although I recognised Deputy Southern...all in all there were 20 people in the room according to my head count (including 7 in the public seats and Deputy Renouf gently pointed out that some of these were from the accredited press but since none were allowed to say anything I was not able to determine how many were just blogging plebs like me)....

So, there we we were, 1/5,000th of the  entire Jersey population and that was about the maximum that could be safely accommodated in Le Capelain Room to hear what the future held for us regarding "our Health"....

As is usual with first meetings with a New Minister being "scrutinized" by a quartet of "New" scrutineers we did not learn anything startling or even  very fresh.
It seems that this Ministry is now undertaking precisely the same never-ending investigations that Deputy Pryke's team were for the previous 3 years and even if they had anything to report Senator Green and his expensive team were not going to tell the Panel because it all has to be submitted to and agreed by the States Assembly first...except that reading between the lines and with one hand over my eye the prospects of building a new hospital seemed to be remote in the near or distant future...

So it was just a "getting to know you" sort of meeting and really just the usual total waste of everybody's time....but they are still looking to make savings of 5% on Health expenditure just like the previous Ministry in compliance with the ancient Ozouf legacy of "austerity" and  "User Pays" through "Privatisation" etc ....

....although in this context the pursuit is described as "efficiency" and a "better service for the public"
but if you really want to know how 13 people managed to talk for 90 minutes without saying anything useful there is always the official transcript to listen to....

....and across the corridor in the Blampied Room it was followed immediately by another "getting  to know you" Scrutiny session with the Corporate Services Panel "led" by the super-soft Deputy Le Fondre and his Panel of 4 (plus 2 assumed Scrutiny staff) but since mumbling was the order of the day here too I am not sure who they were and CM Senator Gorst led his team of 6 (including 1 female) that included Senator Routier and other mumbling supporters...
...the official discussion was about Phase One of  MTFP whatever that might be - but soon centred on the failing tax take and the "risk of a structural deficit" caused by - wait for it - the ever increasing Health budget due to the aging population....

So they waffled along for about 45 minutes of jolly friendly banter until it was decided that the public ( 3 in number) must leave....did they really get down to some serious investigation and scrutiny then I wondered...I also wondered why the two meetings were not joined together and reduced to a single session of I hour so that those involved might get down to some seriously useful work elsewhere....

Perhaps all will be revealed later in 2015 or 6  or....

Jersey Holocaust Memorial Day 2014 - still seeking the baddies?

Once again Holocaust Day has been marked in Jersey with some short speeches, a few prayers and wreath-laying.

For the families of the 21 with Jersey origins who died in the “death camps” there are personal and painful reasons for participating in these proceedings but why members of the government and other VIPs turn out each year is not so clear.

This year we were told that MIND was laying a wreath for the first time in recognition of all the physically and mentally sick people who were persecuted by the “Nazis” and Senator Routier, who has a disabled son, was chosen to represent them.

Quite why his son or any other disabled person was not allowed to lay the wreath was not explained and it may not be relevant because the Senator has had his own health challenges.

Yet he declined to be interviewed for this blog on the ground that it was too emotional and he would not be drawn into the wider deficiencies of the prevailing and active discrimination against disabled persons in Jersey.

Nor would he comment on Jersey’s continuing failure to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People or the fact that even Guernsey has now agreed to a whole Strategy on Disability which includes Ratification of International standards and many other progressive measures for that Bailiwick….

Jersey’s Chief Minister, Senator Gorst also declined to be interviewed in order to update last year’s somewhat inadequate Human Rights message as did the Dean who spoke at the indoor ceremony, said a prayer and lit a candle as usual. His brief address included the rhetorical question – What am I doing here?

The Dean meant at the ceremony rather than here on earth (I presume) but if there is any confusion he still refused to be drawn into a discussion in front of my little camera on the ground that he had to leave to attend a meeting.

Strangely he was talking to influential friends in the miserable outside weather long after I had retreated to somewhere warmer but I still failed to find anybody prepared to speak on camera…

It was the “history” aspect that I particularly wanted to examine since a special wreath laying guest was an historian who had only recently discovered that his grandfather from Jersey had died in a prison camp for failing to surrender a radio. His “crime” had been revealed by the Jersey Attorney General and the St Saviour Police during 1943 and so his fate was sealed along with others of the 21 who died because information was supplied by locals to the occupying forces….

It was this omission from the 2014 Memorial proceedings that bothered me because it is evident that more and more information is leaking out from restricted archives and other sources in Jersey and elsewhere. So just when and how will Channel Islanders deal with the more unpleasant facts of collusion? Who will ultimately decide whether the names of collaborators should be made as public as the identities of those who died or were persecuted as a result of their unfortunate actions?

Channel TV a few years ago, named the two sisters who shopped a whole family for listening to a radio during the Occupation. Their selfish action caused a brother and sister to be sent to the death camps and only the man returned.

In other countries there was immediate post-war justice and rough retribution for those who collaborated. Trials are still taking place for those few ancient survivors who have long-concealed war crimes to answer for.

But nothing has been done so far in the Channel Islands.

As always, it is easier to blame somebody else for the ills in society rather than looking too closely at ourselves.

Thus The Germans aka NAZIS are a very convenient label to stick on the wrongs that occurred during and after the 1930s and it is interesting at least that the various speakers listed the victim groups – Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, Disabled and Sick, Gypsies, Homosexuals – but in every instance could not utter the word - Communists….

It was the Communists after all who started this particular deathly and discriminatory ball rolling in the 1930s and the rest of the world did little or nothing then because their extermination satisfied a wider capitalist game plan….

Unfortunately, after a brief dalliance with respectability it is the Communists who are once again even more “despised” than all the other groups put together in our Capitalist dominated world.

So, although the speakers such as the Dean claimed that we are ALL children of the same God and that we have to respect the rights even of those that we do not agree with – he and they do not really mean it….

History has a strange ability to reveal itself. Secrets have a habit of seeping into the public domain.

Last year there were 22 names on the Jersey Holocaust roll-call but one has now been removed because the person did not die.

Even a trained historian did not realise that his grandfather was a victim along with so many millions of others from diverse groups and world-wide origins.

The record – officially or otherwise – is constantly subject to revision.

Jersey’s Holocaust Memorial ceremony needs to extend its terms of reference soon if it is to be taken as seriously as the subject deserves.