Roisin Pitman

CLOTHIER AND ALL THAT

When Sir Cecil Clothier came over to the island in the mid 90s, I was a Centenier in St. Helier. The Clothier Committee had been set up to look into the machinery of government within the States of Jersey and to pass on recommendations to the House.

I remember well having to run a Centenier's enquiry evening in the vastness of the St. Helier Town Hall Assembly Room with Sir Cecil and five panel members watching on as I dispensed justice to those that were listed to attend that night. Each person, quite rightly, had to be asked if they minded their 'dirty linen' being washed in front of six eminent strangers. Had anyone not agreed, they would have been re-allocated a different date.

After each person had left the room, I was quizzed on my decision making by the panel. It was an exhaustive but extremely interesting peek into the Committee's remit that evening and I am glad that I was given the opportunity to take some small part in the Clothier process.

I was always of the opinion that once the findings of Sir Cecil's report had been shared in the States Chamber that the choice should have been either to implement the findings in their entirety or reject the report wholesale. However, the States decided to cherry pick parts of Clothier they felt were palatable and reject large swathes of it. Thus was borne 'Ministerial government'.

I honestly believe that the island is too small to run efficiently with Ministerial government. There may have been gripes and problems with the old Committee system, headed by a President, which usually consisted of between four and six other members, but States members were more closely involved in decision making than is currently the case.

What we have is a Cabinet headed by a Chief Minister (Prime Minister). While each ministry has Assistant Minister/s and scrutiny panels are set up in some sort of pseudo opposition, many members are sitting on the periphery, peering through the window wondering why they have not been included in important decision making.

My late father, Graeme, was a teenager when he lost his sight. However, he was a highly intelligent young man who was 'discovered' by a couple of forward thinking politicians, as he ended his teen years mending wicker furniture in a shop near the old Oddfellows pub in town.

During his secondary education, the school that he attended did not know how to deal with a disabled child (this was in the late 1940s) and was 'marked as absent' throughout his senior school years, even though he attended school (St. Paul's). He was then educated by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (London) and back in Jersey, sat the Commonwealth examination for the Chartered Institute of Secretaries. My mother recalled that he took his exam in a freezing cold store cupboard at South Hill, because he needed an invigilator to read the exam questions for him to answer. When the results for the 5,000 people that year that took the exam across the Commonwealth were published, my father came out as top of the Commonwealth and became a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries. His first job was as a clerk in the States Greffe.

During his early months at the Greffe, he wasn't given the chance to be allocated a States Committee. There were still prejudices within society about those with a disability. One of the Committee secretaries was a good friend of my father's, Graeme Huelin, who because of an onerous workload, farmed out some of the notes of Committee meetings to my father to transcribe (despite being blind, my father was an accomplished touch typist). On one of the next Committee meetings, Graeme Huelin was asked who typed up the notes for the meeting and he had to concede that it was my father. On the strength of his contemporaneous dissemination, he was given his first Committee. Graeme Huelin (my God father) went on to become the Bailiff's Secretary and then a Deputy for St. Brelade.

I was brought up around the Committee system and I remember that my sister and I fought over who was going to read Dad the latest Committee briefs, agendas and minutes, perched on the couch feeling very grown up (there were no electronic gadgets to assist in the 60s).

I believe that reasoned debate around a Committee table gave every States member a belief that they were making decisions at the heart of government and while the President was the spokesperson for that Committee, there were often five or six other members who were responsible for the decisions made which, nowadays, is made by one person, often without challenge among his/her ministry colleagues. 

Simply put, there is too much power in too few hands. There is less challenge at the point before a decision is made and Ministers start believing their own hype. The Committee system may have been a little slower, but decisions were made after proper debate around the Committee table. The vote in the meetings went with the majority and not the result of one persons megalomaniacal standpoint.