Richard Graham: Trigger happy States

Just when I thought the world couldn’t get any madder, it did.

It’s these so-called trigger warnings that are threatening to upskittle me. Ten years ago, I’d never heard of the pesky things but now they’re everywhere, warning the sensitive souls who apparently dominate the planet these days that just about every work of art contains stuff that will distress them.

It was bad enough when, a few years back, students at a Scottish university were warned that one of the set books for the English Literature course, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, contained descriptions of regicide. The students were advised to steel themselves for the distressing experience, but some didn’t feel up to it and demanded the offer of alternative set books. I remember thinking that an appropriate choice for their level of academic curiosity would have lain somewhere between John Cunliffe’s Postman Pat trilogy and Enid Blyton’s Five Go To Smuggler’s Top, the latter coming with its own trigger warning that some students would be offended by its middle-class smugness. I confess that I thought at the time that this was all a bit wimpish, but I just rolled with the times in the spirit of live and let live.

But it doesn’t get any easier. I have just learned that the sale of tickets for the Leeds Playhouse current production of My Fair Lady is accompanied by the trigger alert that the musical contains ‘depictions of high society and classism’. And there was me thinking that folks up north were made of sterner stuff.

Anyway, if that’s the way the world is, I had better issue my own trigger warning for those readers who are about to read my parliamentary sketch of last week’s States meeting.

The following sketch contains accounts of States members being beastly to each other.

It all began benignly enough with the Scrutiny Management Committee president updating members about SMC’s work during the past year. This committee is more about detailed hard graft than spectacular successes and failures, and its capable president, Deputy Burford, has deservedly managed to remain a relatively uncontroversial and non-divisive member of an unusually toxic and fractious Assembly. So, if any trigger alert was needed, it was to warn against the danger of drowsiness rather than blood-letting. And so it proved, as the statement and subsequent questions were all over within 20 soporific minutes, well short of the 35 minutes allocated under the rules.

This heralded bad news for Deputy Meerveld who, as States Assembly & Constitution Committee president, was next on with his committee’s annual update statement. As he rose to speak, I could hear vengeful lips being licked and smacked among the hard core of 16 members who had opposed the removal of the previous P&R Committee and who had identified Deputy Meerveld as the treacherous agent of that committee’s demise. Not that he needed any trigger alert about impending hostility. Think what you will about Deputy Meerveld, he is truly remarkable in the utter impenetrability of his skin. No insult is so wounding, no criticism so barbed, no embarrassment so acute, that it can dent the armour-plated self-confidence of the Assembly’s very own pet armadillo. Prominent among those airing their doubts that Deputy Meerveld was up to the job were Deputies Mahoney, Inder and Oliver, none of whom exactly strike me as bywords for impactful hyperactivity. They accused him of achieving next to nothing and of attempting to hide his incompetence behind allegedly dubious claims that SACC had no civil service support. Deputy Inder was especially dismissive, alleging that Deputy Meerveld’s negligence had placed democracy itself in peril. Whenever these two enormous egos clash, the debating chamber is scarcely big enough to accommodate all the testosterone that is emitted, making the rapid opening of windows strongly advisable, but the entertainment value rarely disappoints. Deputy Meerveld claimed to have not understood Deputy Inder’s mumbled criticisms and requested that they be mumbled more loudly. Deputy Inder duly obliged with his own excruciating version of exaggeratedly posh elocution that seemed to leave members uncertain whether to laugh or cry. As a demonstration that middle-aged men are capable of acting like a couple of seven-year-olds in the school playground, this was a class act. The Bailiff seemed in no hurry to bring an end to the fun. Quite the reverse. I wonder if I was the only listener who sensed just a hint of mischief when he announced that he was prepared to allow extra time for questions because the unusually brief SMC session had undershot its allotted time by 15 minutes.

The minutes dragged by as the Assembly echoed to the cries of ‘Oh yes I did’ and ‘Oh no you didn’t’, until after 45 minutes members tired of the unedifying game and allowed the session to peter out. The outcome was inconclusive. Deputy Meerveld commendably kept his cool throughout and emerged with no visible wounds, but he was far from unruffled, acutely aware that his critics had picked up his scent and were closing in.

To be continued, if I’m not mistaken.

How long does it take the Assembly to decide not to change a light bulb? The answer is two and a half hours of debate either side of a two-hour lunch break. In the end, the cost of the light bulb and the lack of a civil servant with enough time to unscrew the old bulb and insert the new one, was enough to persuade the majority of members to pass the decision to the next Assembly when it debates public finances in 2026.

Here’s a confession. The debate wasn’t about replacing a dud, inefficient light bulb with an energy-saving LED version. I made that up. It was about a similar need to replace the current, hopelessly cumbersome system that successfully prevents members of the public from holding the States to effective account for the quality of its public services. The parallel with replacing the light bulb is justified. Bearing in mind the States annual revenue is more than £800m. and that the States has around 5,000 public servants on its payroll, the notion that a single civil servant could not be spared to make a 15-minute phone call to the Isle of Man to find out how their public service ombudsman holds government to effective account for as little as £35,000 a year, was a classic case of being penny wise, pound foolish. It was also an appropriate metaphor for this Assembly’s apparent collective contempt for the basic democratic concept that a government should enable those who elect it to hold it to account for the quality of its service delivery rather than put defensive, bureaucratic obstacles in the way of such accountability.

Such was the paranoia over the threat of actually being held to account, that quite extraordinary excuses were offered to justify passing the issue on to the next generation of deputies. With no apparent sense of irony, Deputy Inder warned gravely that the intention to replace the role of hordes of bureaucrats in the complaints system with a single ombudsman somehow had ‘big government written all over it’. By this sort of perverse, bizarre rhetoric, some members effectively convinced themselves that the States has neither the money nor the staff to do anything at all between now and the next general election. I wonder if they will apply the same frugality when it comes to their own vote-catching requetes and amendments which, sure as fate, will characterise the remainder of the political term.

I shall be watching closely.